Endless is the title we have chosen to tell the work of the Sicilian artist Maurizio Pometti.
Why Endless? Because since I met Maurizio he has never stopped dedicating himself to drawing and painting for a single day. Dedication and perseverance are those words that distinguish him and for this reason “Endless” is the title that dresses him best.
The endless love for artistic research leads him, every day, to meet but also to clash with himself. The works that we present in this exhibition are only a small part of his full-bodied work, they are testimony of how the time we are living has been quite influential in the process of the artistic research carried out in recent months.
The exhibition is divided into two sections:
The first, entitled #White (on lockdown), created exactly during the first pandemic wave; and the second, MadameX, which is located after the first period of restriction, in which the artist has more freedom of movement. In both sections it is evident how life, in all its facets, and the passing of time are elements of great influence for the artist. Maurizio, through his hard work, paints the portrait of his everyday life: a vis à vis with reality and the continuous search for beauty, “Endless”, in fact.
In #White there is a search for beauty understood as absence, almost as a negation of the same, that denial that allows you to breathe, canceling any contamination or, if we want, any prejudice. The figures are isolated from a possible scenario, they lie free in the austere white of a non-place.
In MadameX, beauty is embodied in the figure of the essential, of simplicity but also of that desired beauty, of that which one would like to master with extreme ease. The freedom to feel yourself and to treat yourself as a queen in every moment of your existence. Their mouths, full of sensuality and desire, softly whisper to us the revolutionary dream of a beauty that does not fear objectification.
The syncretism of beauty, in the search for a life, that of Maurizio, which has its roots in the contemporary era where, however, it is still difficult to recognize its vastness.
Carla Ricevuto
#White (on lockdown)
The months we have lived and are experiencing have not been easy in many respects, the uncertainty of our health and loved ones, suddenly finding ourselves confined to home to be the first to confront ourselves. At a certain point I was almost used to it, still living a solitary dimension for the work I do and for how I am.
I have the feeling of having lived almost parallel lives during this year and for the first time in a long time I have an enlarged perception of time.
It seemed right to talk about my experience, albeit briefly, because as already mentioned this has changed the relationship with my work, I don’t know if this is lasting or a short parenthesis but it certainly helped me to cross a new territory and review the dimension of silence.
The main change has occurred mainly in the space where my characters move. They are always the same, my family members taken from old family photos and who now live in an unknown dimension, where space only needs the subject. An almost need for breath, an isolation where we do not know where we are going, where we come from, and where we will end up. The questions that I have asked myself and that I ask myself.
The (apparent) elimination of the landscape is also synonymous with freedom: when I think of freedom I think of something that is greater than us, that could dissolve us, something that we cannot fully experience if we are not in control of ourselves. Working through images I asked myself how to solve all this and the most natural solution was to subtract. Subtraction as research, empty as the need to go beyond, beyond the limits that block our potential. Empty as a metaphor. Empty as silence.
Living in the contemporary era we are immersed in a continuous nihilism, where everything now seems finished and meaningless, where we must surrender to the fact that freedom does not exist because we are trapped in a capitalist system larger than us, where money is everything and probably in absence of it the present society would not make sense.
Where our ego is dictated by social patterns from which we cannot escape.
All true, I too often think this, but as an artist I would like at least to seek a way with my medium, that of painting. Research can be a salvation, research can be freedom to express our potential and conjunction with the divine, whether this is painting, music, or any other passion that gives meaning to a person’s life. We are always trapped in this society, but research can give us a purpose, a strength.
I cannot give any answers, freedom is perhaps a state of mind, an attitude, a struggle or something taken for granted. For what I do my instinct is to solicit further questions, and one in particular: where are we going?
MADAMEX
MadameX is the natural evolution of the “Queen” painting started two years ago. Queen was conceived for the series “Sleeping with Ghosts”, the center of the research was the memory and the relationship with one’s past through the personal photographic medium, family photos, which now were no longer frozen moments of life but ghosts , indeed, and unresolved issues that I carried, and I carry, with me.
Queen (homage to my mother) is a simple woman, she doesn’t need a throne, she finds a way to move forward and helps her children. She is happy with small wishes and lives the habit of a family. Queen ran away as a girl for love, and that’s why she keeps going. It’s not always all good, but someone says he treats her like a queen. From this I thought I could deepen the theme of women. Who is Madame X? It is the personality that I want to be, it is a dream that I look in the mirror. The desire to be something that I am not, she more than any other old photo is present.
I wanted to be desired as MadameX is desired so I have always designed and admired her, each of my models is MadameX.
