ITINERARY OF A LANDSCAPE.
From abstraction to the tree...

Eugenio Castro.

The title of this exhibition suggests the existence of a single landscape and its constant evolution. A mental landscape and a real one unfolding before us in parallel with the artist’s own evolution. On the occasion of his recent exhibition Landscapes by Heart at Galería 57, Madrid, I already stressed the impact of Maurizio’s first trip to Spain as an enduring encounter with matter, both in the pictorial and the natural sense which, as the suspension points of the subtitle suggest (“From abstraction to the tree …”), still exists and continues. The adventure of matter which arouses telluric and spiritual dimensions, switching from one to another with formal and mental radicalism, following a process whereby form and space are transformed until they reach a final stage where landscape is born to its new corporeity.

Matter and space, colour and light. Common as they are to any pictorial task, the different grades in which they appear give each landscape its singular contrast. It is the artist’s duty, it is his task, to find the all-embracing atmosphere of such singularity, to open up its inner world with its storms and calms, its lights and shadows, its matter and its spirit.

As far as Maurizio Lanzillotta is concerned, he covers the stages aimed to give back to that landscape its “real” image where each of its elements plays a role that gives the picture its timeless character.

In the mid ‘90s (precisely the starting point of this exhibition) Lanzillotta culminates a period marked by his devotion to a pictorial task based on informalism and abstract expressionism. A devotion indeed: upon arriving in this country, he responds passionately and skilfully to his discovery of the plastic, persistent and extreme landscape of the Castilian plains which made such deep impression on him. The artist takes on quite unaffectedly his surroundings and lets himself be absorbed by them with the spontaneity and perplexity of a newcomer (isn’t that the state that creation leads to, the fulfilled promise of the journey?) He will also incorporate with great skill the contrasts offered by the new spaces. The pictures belonging to that period which have been chosen for this exhibition are a good example of the quality of his work and very representative of the level it reached, shaping at the same time a seasoned pictorial personality in constant progression. With an almost “animal” capacity, he becomes steeped with the magmatic field, the freedom, the daring demanded by an expansive pictorial space which to a good extent was also conspiratorial with the U.S. all- over (“Great Red” 1994-95). In the same way, and above all, he plunges into the gut passion (but in no case exempt of a rational structure) of Spanish informal art using the murky shades of mud and the ochre of earth, the dryness of a surface which should collect the relentless, dry, hard light (“Without title”, 1993-94). In my opinion, that period shows in the artist a quality which, although not really private, was certainly becoming more and more personal. He was walking then along his borders, perhaps not led by the need to know his limits, but certainly becoming aware as he went not only of the extension of his field but also of its depth. And yet, what is really outstanding in these pictures would only be known, indeed become visible, as a result of the course taken by the artist some time later. I am referring to the modular division (shy but clear) and the constructive method applied in some of his pictures (“Fields of the Castilian plateau”, 1994), the disposition of planes and surfaces that combine chaos and matter with evanescence and mist (“Ascent”, 1991). This will be of great relevance in order to understand what Lanzillotta was then going to shrewdly explore and develop. And we must keep in mind a fact that from then on will be characteristic of the artist’s work, namely his sensitiveness towards light (colour) which he had already shown in his first “informalist” and “abstract expressionist” period and which some of his titles confirm (“Due cieli, 1993; “Orco”, 1993”). It is as if a sort of surplus of light of primitive Italian origin was warning us of the lyric substance of his work.

There is one picture (“Without title”, 1994-95”) that stands out as the turning point between both approaches. It already shows the orthogonal division of the surface together with the overlapping of stripes which give depth to the painting. Dense in the foreground, light and few in the background (and sometimes melting into the first thin lines that run through them), those stripes prevent any possible attempt to dissolve the entire plastic space, to disengage it until it becomes one single cosmic spazio, as the colours of the background subtly start to merge. True that even then we still have the inner shades of the two main colour columns (the two side ones) which give this painting a considerable physical significance. Naturally, the material of which it is made contributes to this effect: strips of canvas used as paint and colour, and painted on again by Lanzillotta, thus reinforcing their tangible nature. But as I suggested, this painting is the core of his creative flow which it will immediately determine. And just as the memory of a landscape persists in it, the artist also sets himself to forget such landscape renewing his experience of it and confirming a considerably renovated plastic vision. But such forgetfulness is not just a metaphor, it will substantiate in his pictorial development. In 1996 he will work on the non-need of representation, insisting that light must blind all reference. He doesn’t quite achieve his goal, the residual elements that define that memory obviously remain. But he does make progress in his capacity of capturing the spectrum of matter, the energy which he makes visible by transforming matter into light. It is not in vain, as is easily appreciated, that during this period the strips of canvas have been substituted in his pictures for bars of light. And the fades, the shadings and the transparency of colour give its luminescent character to an image which has become less and less recalling of anything (“Waiting room for a Mahatma”, 1995). This search for nothingness (for such is Maurizio Lanzillotta’s search in his work and in his life) will consequently culminate, a few years later, when he finally finds, or very closely approaches it. This introspection, initiated somewhat grossly, in the open air, must be now externalized through images faithful to the process undergone and, above all, representative of the painting he had pursued and achieved. The effort led him inevitably to such refinement of his work that the new should be totally different fro the old, without ever blocking the internal flow that linked both. That is how the artist worked on the “dispelling” of colours, striving to reach a single-shaded atmosphere that would embrace the desired cosmic dimension. In my opinion, Lanzillotta manages at that moment, with the greatest precision and skill, to bring together his plastic experience and the meaning of his creative process. For if anything should remain clear after all we have said is the artist’s determination to draw the hidden spirit of his paintings, working on their invisibility, on the expanded core of the inexplicable, where only light shines. That is the meaning of his art, to vindicate light as its raison d’être, as a pictorial and spiritual summit. And light indeed are these paintings. Light without and light within (Punti di luce, punti d’ombra, 2000-01), completely soaking de surface, turned into contemplative space. I am not sure that the artist had in mind to make of these paintings an ascetic experience (he turned to Buddhist literature –the Theravada- in order to better grasp western spirituality and come to terms with it), but he did intended at least some ascetic contents to arise from them. In any case, we can perceive in them a remarkably sensitive and sensual atmosphere deriving from their voluptuous brightness and the generosity of their spaces, both in accordance with the sensitive qualities of colour (“Spazio giallo”, 1997). In the end, he manages to sublimate a landscape that returns us to the world … and reconciles us to it.

The response to this triumphant principle of unity is to keep a peaceful atmosphere in his paintings parallel to the peace of his mind. And so, with great trust in his technical and imaginative skills and wanting to see again in the body of things, free from the symbolic vision he had challenged himself with until then –but not ignoring it-, the artist decides conscientiously to recover the “traditional” love for painting landscapes, concentrating his more recent efforts on recalling a pacified nature with oneiric and symmetric echoes. Thus, he will not just reproduce the landscape realistically -nor would we expect it from him, it is not his mental habit nor is it part of his artistic concerns. What he certainly does is devote himself with delight to figure, showing the great love he has for it. And I am not referring to the human figure, which incidentally was the subject of two pictorial series (“Portraits of the Soul”, 2000. “Portraits of the Body”, 2002. Such are the titles of each of the exhibitions held at Sala Maior, Oporto, Portugal). I am referring to the figures of a tree, a tornado and another tree, alone in the vast landscape (see the catalogue of his exhibition “Landscapes by Heart” mentioned before). Indeed, in his new dedication to the physical fact, the ilex, the twister and the cypress will be the reincarnation of the values contained in the rest of Maurizio Lanzillotta’s works: the feeling of the sacred and of ascent, turmoil and peace, dissolution and appearance, the unprotected, all-embracing space. He devotes himself to them with the same reflexive, diligent, simplifying mood as he did before, striving to experience a mental peace proportionate to the visual pleasure which defines and dominates the contemplation of these pictures. It is all pervaded by an atmospheric rapture ascribable, let me say it again, to the artist’s confirmed ability to make light show all its splendour. Lanzillotta constantly summons us to the light, and on it he bestows the life of the landscape that today conforms his creation, a single, itinerant landscape of the inside and the outside in constant transformation …