Concord of Gentle: The Work of Matteo Massagrande

Matteo Massagrande finds quiet poetry within the misplaced worlds of abandoned areas.

The work of Italian artist Matteo Massagrande take viewers into long-neglected villas and deserted palazzos—locations the place crumbling plaster and once-glorious marble flooring, rotting shutters and peeling paint result in sun-drenched balconies lined with rusting ornamental railings. The brilliant Mediterranean mild, most frequently glimpsed by home windows and doorways, someway permeates these deserted interiors with a type of slow-moving luminosity that finds its manner gently throughout stretches of ornamental tiles and elaborate moldings earlier than lapsing into the shadows of long-shuttered rooms. The images are painted with an intense sensuality, wherein the artist achieves his results by layering a number of glazes and myriad delicate touches with brush and palette knife. The ultimate impact is wistful, elegiac and just a bit surreal—like a reminiscence remodeled and intensified by a dream. 

A Pull to the Gentle

Massagrande traces his curiosity in this type of imagery to his childhood experiences within the Veneto area of northeastern Italy, the place he grew up. His aunt owned a palazzo close to Treviso, the place his household typically visited. Massive elements of the constructing had been shuttered, and entry was forbidden, however the younger artist started to discover them anyway. “The villa holds an important place in my life,” he says. “In that home, I encountered and studied the concepts of area and light-weight. It was a fantastic home. Within the darkness of these forbidden rooms, I used to be in a position to uncover the appeal of their proportions. The sensation was that of a harmonious place. My buddies had been afraid, whereas I used to be busy finding out mild, opening the shutters in numerous positions and at totally different occasions of the day. It was like dwelling inside a portray by Bellini.”

Though Massagrande studied portray at school, a lot of his artwork schooling was casual. “I don’t regard my actual artwork coaching to have taken place at school,” he says. “Since childhood I’ve identified and frolicked with one of the best artists from Veneto and past.” Some early mentors included Giovanni Barbisan (1914–88), Luigi Tito (1907–91) and Guido Cadorin (1892–1976)—all revered artists in northern Italy. “I discovered the foundations of portray within the subject, within the workshop,” he says. “From each one in all them I obtained recommendation that I nonetheless like to repeat to younger artists whom I meet. It wasn’t simple, as a teen, to progress with the burden and duty of a lot technical information, in addition to mental and sensible expertise. It wasn’t useless weight, nevertheless. Within the workshops, we weren’t solely speaking about methods, but additionally about philosophy, literature and music: the alphabet of the emotion of artwork.”

Massagrande finally went on to attend the Superb Arts Academy, in Venice, in 1977, however discovered the expertise disappointing and left after his second yr. Fascinated by the Previous Grasp methods he had discovered from his early mentors, he labored for some years as an artwork restorer. “It was nearly inevitable that I got here into contact with the world of restorers,” he says. “Whereas working as a painter and printmaker, I additionally frolicked within the workshop of a professor who used to revive art work for the Diocese of Rome and for the regional division of Lazio of the Ministry of Tradition, the place I labored as her assistant. It was a solution to put my information into follow. With the ability to analyze and work on necessary canvases from the sixteenth, seventeenth and 18th centuries was an actual privilege. I’ll all the time bear in mind Professor Scabia with gratitude for the belief that she put in me. This expertise influenced my future work, as I had the chance to be taught a few of the secrets and techniques of the constructions of these harmonious compositions.”

A Portray Unfolds

One motive Massagrande’s work tackle such a dreamlike feeling is that they’re composite views based mostly on a number of buildings and settings. Another excuse for the weird manner wherein his compositions unfold is that they’re inbuilt sections, typically ranging from the germ of an thought. There aren’t any general sketches or designs to start with, and the artist will work up one part significantly earlier than transferring on to the following. “The composition comes out by a strategy of germination,” he says. “The areas, surfaces and colours add to 1 one other in a complementary trend, as if in a jigsaw puzzle. Just like the best way previous frescoes was once painted day-to-day—there’s a beginning thought, which is the emotional state. With out that, a piece wouldn’t be artwork however merely ornament.”

Massagrande builds his work on a tough floor, both panels or canvas glued to a board. “The floor of a portray is essential to my course of,” he says. “The fabric and its thickness are basic to acquiring the ultimate mild I’m after. As with the work of the sixteenth century, the obvious perfection of the shapes in my portray breaks down and blurs when noticed up shut. It makes me smile once I’m described as a hyperrealist or as a photorealist.” Certainly an in depth inspection of the artist’s work reveals that types are achieved with numerous damaged portray and suggestive marks somewhat than rigorously deliberate clean gradients. “The method is lengthy and begins with the medium I exploit and the substrate upon which I paint,” he says. “Each artist should discover the floor that’s proper for them; in any other case, they will’t be free. I exploit each the comb and the palette knife. I additionally use my fingertips, scraping the place obligatory, in addition to sponges and anything that I really feel is true to make use of within the second. The layering of colours will depend on the sunshine that I need to create. Typically I apply as many as 20 layers.”

Discovering Inspiration All over the place

“Something and all the pieces could be helpful to my compositions. Typically simply seeing the colour scheme of a random journal web page is sufficient to set off the will to create a portray. It’s a course of just like that skilled by many artists of the Renaissance. Antonello da Messina didn’t have to see how Saint Jerome’s studio appeared to have the ability to paint it. These areas are born from compositional wants. To attain this, all the pieces could be helpful. My thoughts builds locations from drawings, pictures, private recollections, photographs, particulars from passages of texts I’ve learn—and even from smells and noises which are notably evocative. I take a stroll, and my mind perceives all the pieces as a composition.

One instance of this occurred just a few years in the past, once I was within the hospital. From my window I may observe a column and a tree—a picture that ended up with a seascape in my portray Adriatico [Above]. Every thing can encourage. Greater than the bodily components in a portray, it’s the standard of the sunshine that almost all evokes me. The locations that I paint aren’t empty as a result of I’m a tragic particular person, however as a result of they’re inhabited by the sunshine that I examine, search for and have been creating for 50 years. Like El Greco, I search for my inside mild.” – Matteo Massagrande

A Mixture of Supplies

A part of the wealthy variation of Massagrande’s surfaces emerges from his use of blended media. “My approach includes using glues, glycols, wax, egg yolks, oils, pastels, inks, lacquers, ox gall, linseed oil and several other forms of starch,” he says. “I keep away from drying brokers, which I’ve by no means trusted. I solely use a pasting brush for varnishing. I paint the primary layers with brushes product of hog hair.”

Massagrande’s work not solely possess wealthy surfaces however enjoyment of depicting them. Cracked plaster, flaking paint and splintering woodwork are rendered with a substantial plasticity, utilizing qualities of the paint and its dealing with to imitate such options with extraordinary conviction. With a lot paint-building occurring, he typically finds it obligatory to make use of masking tape to separate areas of labor, a method that leaves some remarkably crisp edges in what are in any other case very painterly work. “It’s an historic approach,” he says. “Traces of one thing comparable had been even present in Giotto’s frescoes within the Scrovegni Chapel. The masking is crucial to keep away from staining areas which have been painted already. Nevertheless, this should serve my functions; it’s not a components. I solely use it when obligatory, for sensible causes. The borders made by the masking tape are a part of my strategy and are built-in with the ultimate imaginative and prescient.” The artist additionally makes use of small rectangular steel scrapers that he makes use of to carry a straight edge when he’s brushing in an space.

Whereas Massagrande’s surfaces look fairly lavish, the sense of sunshine transmitting by the work owes an important deal to using glazes. The artist deploys these all through the portray course of from starting to finish. “The glaze is a breath,” he says. “In my work, the glaze is sort of a second of silence between one sentence and one other in a dialog. So as to add glazes solely towards the tip makes a portray look previous. This isn’t my manner of working. In every of my work, there are lots of of glazes which may be lacquers, varnishes or waxes.”

Constructing such elaborate and wealthy work, a course of that may take many weeks, presents the artist with the problem of figuring out when a portray is completed. His resolution is deeply intuitive. “I sort out one portray at a time,” he says. “Once I paint, I’m actually in that place. Once I depart, I perceive that the portray is completed.”

On His Palette

Massagrande paints on board or canvas glued to board utilizing hog hair brushes. When utilizing tempera paints, he mixes the pigments himself. For oil portray, he prefers earth pigments by Maimeri and Di Volo. For different colours, he makes use of pigments by Winsor & Newton, Sennelier and Lefranc & Bourgeois. The artist augments his normal oil portray approach with using wax and lacquers.

A Room with a View

The outcomes of Massagrande’s strategy could be seen in work like Greek Gentle XII, a chunk from a brand new collection the artist calls, “Luci della Grecia,” or “The Lights of Greece.” Right here we glance out from a room in a dilapidated villa to a lined balcony that ends all of a sudden with a view out to sea and a headland. A damaged window to the proper is festooned with cobwebs whereas to the left the darkness of the inside makes its presence felt by a shadow working down the aspect of the portray. The balcony roof is made up of corrugated iron and woodwork, each painted white and falling into decay. The ground tile is cracked, and the ornamental railing has seen higher days. The richly constructed paint surfaces are interrupted in numerous locations by crisp, straight traces forming the sides of home windows and helps.

Specifically, the practically vertical line simply off-center that types the division from the inside to the outside area has a considerably abrupt high quality, including to the unusual environment of the portray. The scene brilliantly marries the sense of highly effective exterior daylight with the extra contained motion of sunshine across the constructions of the constructing. All through the portray, the rendering of floor texture is wonderful whereas using perspective and the considerably fish-eye impact on the edges of the portray serve to open the area and draw us into the composition. All these methods mix harmoniously to create the compelling feeling of longing that inhabits the portray.

Something and all the pieces could be helpful to Massagrande’s compositions. “Typically simply seeing the colour scheme of a random journal web page is sufficient to set off the will to create a portray,” he says. “It’s a course of just like that skilled by many artists of the Renaissance. Antonello da Messina didn’t have to see how Saint Jerome’s studio appeared to have the ability to paint it. These areas are born from compositional wants. To attain this, all the pieces could be helpful. My thoughts builds locations from drawings, pictures, private recollections, photographs, particulars from passages of texts I’ve learn—and even from smells and noises which are notably evocative. I take a stroll, and my mind perceives all the pieces as a composition.”

One instance of this occurred just a few years in the past, when Massagrande was within the hospital. From his window, the artist may observe a column and a tree—a picture that ended up with a seascape in his portray Adriatico. “Every thing can encourage,” he says. “Greater than the bodily components in a portray, it’s the standard of the sunshine that almost all evokes me. The locations I paint aren’t empty as a result of I’m a tragic particular person, however as a result of they’re inhabited by the sunshine that I examine, search for and have been creating for 50 years. Like El Greco, I search for my inside mild.”

Ultimately, the ability of Massagrande’s work rests on his capability to maintain an environment and a selected situation of sunshine all through a posh and satisfying spatial association. That is bolstered by a pathos generated by photographs of deserted buildings to create works that supply the viewer a spot for quiet contemplation and reflection. Or, because the artist places it: “I would really like that each viewer may discover in one in all my work, and even in one in all its particulars, the start of a thought.”

Writer Bio

John A. Parks is a painter, a author and a member of the school on the Faculty of Visible Arts, in New York Metropolis.

Concerning the Artist

Matteo Massagrande was born in Padua, Italy, and grew up in Treviso, the place his household owned a store. He obtained early coaching in portray and printmaking from native masters. After finding out briefly in Venice, on the Academy of Superb Artwork, he labored for a while as an art work restorer, changing into ever extra conversant in the Previous Masters’ methods. He started exhibiting his personal work in 1973, and has garnered a world fame since then, displaying his work broadly in Europe, america, Asia and Australia. His work have appeared in quite a few museum exhibitions, together with one at The Fralin Museum of Artwork on the College of Virginia, Charlottesville, and alongside a Van Gogh exhibition at Centro San Gaetano, in Padova, Italy, in 2021. The artist and his spouse break up their time between a house in Padua, Italy, and one other in Hajos, Hungary, close to his spouse’s household. To view extra of Massagrande’s artwork, go to the Pontone Gallery (pontonegallery.com), in London, which represents his work.