Maurizio Marinelli VDR 1-14 Music for colors and canvas Beatrice Menozzi (Italiano) When talking about Maurizio Marinelli’s paintings, an introduction is necessary: each translation is, by nature, a betrayal. More so when you have to put signs, not words into language, signs miracolously saved from the failure of reality. Yet they are not reality: they do not swim by the river bed sure of a structured layout, nor are they bound for remote, but real figurations. Instead they are musical notes free in the air, vibrant and flimsy that suddenly, for a misterious atmospheric phenomenon condense in chromatic rain, falling back on to the painting, tapping it sometimes whipping it and, inspite of everything, clotting in existences that are not real, only: in the turgidity of the reds, in the dizzying darkness of the black, in the sparkle of the yellow, in the blue, with it’s spray of the sea. Ah, it is easy for the person writing to give way to narrative temptations, explanatory in the temptation to translate, that is to betray. Homer, when speaking about the word, he defined it ‘with wings’: His literary miracle has been handed down and translated by the voices of choristers, who accompanied it with music and improvisation, before it was imprisoned by the written word. Words with wings’, mixed with music and improvisation would be needed to tell the pictorial adventure of Maurizio Marinelli. Bored by the images used by advertising, from the words that ooze words, one day, he discovered an unfinished painting in a closed drawer and decided to free himself of that oppressive cumbersome baggage. He , who had made a life-time career of communication: a degree in DAMS (University of Bologna), he is now in charge of a research laboratory that offers information services in the area of communication technology to an important Bolognese industrial group. He is president of Baskerville, a study centre of communication and a publishing house. He holds Communication lessons in various Italian universities. But, looking at his paintings, he could almost hear them warning, with the philosofy that ‘it is better to keep quiet about things you can not speak about’.’ Not even the titles offer an anchor to the sight, in their cryptic obscurity: they are a disheartening succession of numbers and initials. Agnosticism? Nihilism? It is not so: like the sound that comes before the articulated word, so in the history of art, abstraction comes before figuration. And it is this theory that Marinelli relies upon in his creative project, which does not refuse communication, but decides to join it to the original tools: sound and abstraction. The “origins” to which he obtains, are not, if the truth be known, lost in past nights and have a definite name: jazz and action painting. After having abbandoned the brush for twenty years, but still reflecting on painting, Marinelli has started again with the knowledge that he must eliminate what is not necessary, that he must clean the pictorial dictation from what has been contaminating the purity of his expressive vein for a long time:the artist has recognised this pollutive illegitimate element in the influence of Pop Art. Pop Art rhymes with Pop Music. Like Abstraction rhymes with Jazz. From this embrace of music and colour, that seduced years before even it’s ideal teacher, Jackson Pollock, was born chromatic improvisations that played on the superimposition of drops of primary colours (like the ones that appear at the side of this text),they melt in the density of the paste the volatile echo of a gust of Jazz, becoming clotted matter to touch, flowering colours to attract the eye. It is the only concession that the artist makes to story telling; on one side the musical score, on the other the chromatic keyboard, ready to be played, to tell, and to improvise, the origin of an emotion. Like VDR6: a big black chimney filled with lapillus of blue lava. And VDR11: a big bang of blood, splashed on an uneven white wall. But is it really this? Or, behind the wandering eye, hunting some wreckage of reality, does Marinelli want to deceive us, pretending to disobey? If his originality was forced, it would not make sense even to himself, like many he leads us astray and if we were to meet him today,we would use the wit of Stan Hunt: “Why are you an anticonformist like all the others?” Instead the painting proposal of this artist, which is the first step to a rediscovery destined to grow in an articulated chimney, has the spirit of a jazz lover. Born amongst the black population of New Orleans and Louisiana, jazz represented a kind of entertainment and escape, which then became in New York and Paris, music for the elite, informed by preciosity from contemporary music. His plot is interweived by chance. But by an author, researched, in a constant tension created by studying, and reflexion. You need rules to be disorderly. Just like Maurizio Marinelli. (from the catalog of the Gallery 8,75) <VDR - Entrata >