La natura delle cose

Maurizio Donzelli is back collaborating with Caterina Tognon’s gallery of contemporary art again,  and he’s here with a specific site, aided by Francesco Poli. He is continuing his artistic research of these recent years, ‘The nature of things’ rendering the drawing the absolute protagonist, blending the element of artistic-picturesque language and practical in revealing the surrounding world. Drawing is not just simple illustration for Donzelli, but becomes ‘the beginning’: a beginning which contains a powerful number of descriptions of the world, future or past.

The artist intervenes almost in an architectonic way in an empty gallery, reinterpreting the emptiness, with a simplicity which is not banal, rather extra-ordinary. Palazzo da Ponte becomes a frame for this great work made up of more than three hundred drawings on paper, all side by side on this floor. The rooms of the gallery are transformed in one huge installation, in which the vertical edges of the walls become an architectonic frame which greets both the work and the public. Signs, subjects and glances from the public meet, generating an infinitive number of exchanges and identities. The drawings along the borders generate sets and new relations, unforeseeable, giving shape to further analogies in the images, which, at times one can define, and at others, are imprecise.

The revolution is in the stalling the daily and rediscovering the lost angles; Donzelli’s work causes an upheaval here, but at the same time accentuates the identity: it explores the surfaces of the gallery, highlighting the bumpy angles, speaking with space and inviting the viewer to do so too. The entrance to the gallery is the entrance to the piece of work itself: art overcomes physical limits like doors and windows, while fitting perfectly into the ambiance. The dialectic used in this spatial reinterpretation aims at instability, and generates crisis, it deconstructs while also reconstructing. Donzelli proposes new points of view and projections up to now unheard of: the fixed points disappear, the certainties are fluid and suggest hypothesis of instability. A new thought is insinuated and speaks to us of the dizziness of what we hold firm, by telling new points of view and murmuring the transient of architecture and structures (mentally?). 

The work can be interpreted as being in progress, or even as a suspended piece that becomes an invitation at becoming creators ourselves, by filling the space through our own imagination and using an art which reveals itself to be the final phase of a process of analysis and knowledge of places.

MAURIZIO DONZELLI | SHORT BIO
 

Maurizio Donzelli (Brescia, 1958) has exhibited in several countries, both in Italy and abroad, and his works are part of important private collections and some are in museums. All his pieces are also a philosophical reflection on art. A reflection, not abstract, but put into motion while doing the piece. A designer without limits, interruptions or mediations, Donzelli is author of a series of performances entitled ‘Machine for drawing’, of video-drawings, of designs for glass, and even ‘Mirrors’ which through their ever changing surface offer the spectator different points of view of the piece.