Stefano Maestrini
EN PLAIN AIR
July August 2012
Arzalò - Oira of Crevoladossola
The interesting artistic development of this sensitive and acute thinker led him from his figurative beginnings, exhibited in the 1992 exhibition in Piazza Chiossi, with landscapes and still lifes that allowed him to perfect himself in color and light, to a decidedly more spiritual, which made him rediscover Kandinsky's art and which he now sees as the truest art, the only one capable of giving voice to his inner being. But the works of the 1990s were already characterized by an attention to the spirit, in the phrases that accompanied the paintings, taken from Kandinsky's "The spiritual in art" and from Marc's "The Blue Knight". The work on color instead dates back to 2005, with a study on the mixes and shades of the basic colors.
However, the search for the beyond can be seen above all in the faces, which become a pretext for breaking up the realistic data and letting what is beyond appearances emerge. Maestrini sees matter as a means for the journey towards the spiritual, and concrete life as the proof of our daily research. Maestrini is above all a philosopher, as he explains our being hic et nunc with the mission of observation and work on oneself. "Creole" of 2009 is the meeting point between realistic portrait, landscape and spiritual portrait, thus marking the halfway point. In the spiritual faces the background interpenetrates with lines of energy, which dissipate the sharp contours of the face, as happens in "Underwater dream" of 2011, where the dreamlike suggestion dominates in the suspension of the vertical lines and the search for empty space appears in the large, monochromatic and uniform palette knife backgrounds. The need for emptiness, born in painting, if it does not have the right of citizenship in nature, however expresses an existential condition: our mind is always solicited by superficial thought, which helps daily decisions, but prevents us from drawing on the profound dimension of the self . Making the void around, which in painting means reducing the realistic data to a minimum, clears the way for the path and allows one to look out over the panoramas of the soul, the seat of all the answers. Through "Fragments of one" (against an urban background dominated by fires and sirens, the policeman is uncertain about what to do, almost as if he perceived that all men are one and that the actions of the individual ultimately have repercussions on him) thus to “Flowing”, where the face disintegrates as it is crossed by a flow, and to “Empatia”, two dreamlike disintegrated faces, which meet and merge into an area of vapor which makes them a single spiritual matter.
But October 31, 2011 is the date that marks Maestrini's arrival at abstract realm, which happened naturally, to the point of arousing surprise in the artist himself: in “Abstract n. 1” the normally understood face is completely outdated, as well as any other realistic data. Pure thought has become an image. This is the essence of art, and any other words are superfluous.
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