Mauro Masetti.
Born in Ravenna in 1960 where he lives and works, self-taught training.
The passion for art comes from winter walks by the sea, collecting materials brought to the beach by the tides. Giving life back to something unused such as wood, bottle caps, plastic and iron scraps, has always thrilled him and he draws inspiration from the materials he uses.
The first creations were furnishing tables and frames, later he moved on to the canvases that he made mainly using jute sacks.
"It all started from an end and so without knowing it or wanting it, I found myself spreading color on all kinds of surfaces that I could find in my hands during my small handicraft works which mainly consisted of small furniture tables made with materials recovery.
I felt a sense of peace and amazement arise in me and painting became a daily requirement.
The search for color, working with matter, creating shapes have become part of my world, of my daily being.
Abstract and informal are the artistic currents to which I approached with greater interest and from which I draw inspiration as I feel them close to my being. "
I have exhibited in numerous Italian cities including Bologna, Trento, Lucca, Naples, Venice, Rome and also abroad New York, Cannes, Stalingrad and others.
First exhibition in Casola Valsenio (RA); followed by participation in the trade fairs in Padua, Turin, Forlì, Pavia, Milan and at the EXPO New York; solo and group exhibitions.
Bologna - Wiki Art Gallery
Trento - Palazzo delle Alberte
Lucca - Villa Bottini
Preganziol (TV) - Elle Gallery
Piacenza - La Spadarina Gallery
Milan - Mu-Mi ex Furnace Museum
Masetti has been present in the Giorgio Mondadori MODERN ART CATALOG since 2016, in the 2018 CONTEMPORARY ART YEARBOOK edited by Dr. Francesca Bogliolo, in the Artistic Sensations V Ed.Mondadori catalog, Untitled catalog year 2018 Ed.Mondadori; publications in the magazine Arte.
They wrote: Antonio Castellana, Gian Luigi Cerruti, Fabio Bianchi, Francesca Bogliolo, Denitza Nedkova.
SEE ALL ARTWORKS BY MAURO MASETTI
For Masetti, working with matter means dealing strictly with life, with everyday life in its multiform expressions. Everything starts and ends with and in the material which, gradually, is raw, worked, biological .... For an artist to represent through the material means to seek a mediation that becomes purification. It also means metaphorically probing our soul in search of the inexpressible. Paradoxically, the variety of colors does not stick, rather it detaches, brings together the various experiences of the great circuit of aesthetic and sensorial life. The visual richness of the society of images creates a greater stimulus to understand the potential of matter. In the works present here he deals with and holds many energies, perhaps repressed, trying to make them emerge on a surface. Perhaps more, on an almost three-dimensional substrate that has or could have the historical and cultural consistency of a book to convey not written words, but emotions and feelings. Masetti uses different materials such as wood, plastic, foam rubber and others and focuses on both the chromatic combination and the synthesis-superimposition to seek a particular expressiveness. In some works he attributes to color a sign function, elsewhere referential, in still others he camouflages nature.
Fabio Bianchi
Mauro Masetti, creative multifaceted from Ravenna, decides to analyze the current anthropocentric dynamics of construction of phenomenal reality through the aesthetic translation of the physical fact of greater portentous aura, or rather the refraction of light in matter. Thus artifacts are born pregnant with colored paste or layered plaster that recall some of the universal elements from which every material interaction arises: air, earth, light…. The pictorial surface becomes an optical prism that produces chromatic data immediately formalized by the artistic intervention in grid-like mappings with an organic aspect. The visceral and unstable patterns that make up Masetti's work acquire their latent dynamism from the constant tension between geometric elements and vibrant chromatic backgrounds that find a temporary figurative resolution in each canvas. The artistic act therefore focuses on the treatment of light which allows a stylistically inconstant and multiple study of the physical limits of the relationship between matter and the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye.
However, just when the lumen seems absent, in the vast dark and deep fields or in the sharpness of the dotted shapes, it is then that the real body of the light radiation arises as it defines each container. The content, on the other hand, remains forever a prerogative of the universal or individual artefex. This latter intuition defines the entire art of Mauro Masetti.
Denitza Nedkova
Between life and its most intimate understanding there is a subtle border on which the artistic activity of Mauro Masetti is located, allowing a privileged point of view. Matter and color, demanding travel companions, guide you beyond the threshold of knowledge, in search of yourself and new visions of the world. Masetti's is a painting full of possibilities, of dialogical encounters between what one creates and what one is, in a continuous emotional exchange that keeps the secret of life intact: starting over. Material tensions distributed on several levels tell the research of the artist who, working on the canvas, incessantly investigates his own being: the alternation of materials and techniques allows a sensorial approach that leads to a living imagination, in which the technique takes on the role of mediator. In a similar way to the literary style exercises of the French Queneau, Masetti re-proposes to the public the artistic tradition of the last 100 years, gutted, analyzed and re-proposed through his personal vision. The ability to synthesize the sign of the twentieth century is expressed in production cycles that enter into close relationship with the great protagonists of our time. The competitive and coloristic modules conceal elegant quotations, the emotions change in front of the careful re-proposition of what can no longer be, but continues to be updated in a new form. The heterogeneous materials support Masetti in this composite and investigating artistic process: the resulting exploration seems to lead from the past to the present following the common thread of variation which, like the literary or symphonic one, guarantees a narration on multiple levels. It is not the form with its facets that interests Masetti rather the decomposition and analysis of the same that allows him to get in touch with the core of art and, in turn, with the heart of time and the meaning of life. The artist's inner energy shows a strong desire to give new life to the material and its structural value: the canvases are conceived as spatial opportunities within which free questions and certainties move. What yesterday was, had another history and another function, can take on a new value for the present that lives and which delivers it to a time in which to rediscover meaning: Masetti moves with the certainty that the eye modern, accustomed to overexposure, can no longer grasp the hidden qualities of things. "We are blind who, despite seeing, do not see", the artist tries to tell us, paraphrasing Saramago through his pictorial activity. Opening our eyes, allowing us a new look at the known, inviting us to a new search for meaning. These are the imperatives proposed by Masetti, the ones we should listen to.
Francesca Bogliolo
