Mario Tessari

Paolo Rizzi, 1989

(translated by Leda Cempellin) It is a capricious and refined technique; an original way to weld antiquity and modernity; a surreal inclination of feelings. These are the qualities that stand out at the most, when looking at the paintings by Mario Tessari. We are especially amazed at some extremely free solutions, where the subject (generally the woman) makes mysterious allusions, with lots of allegorical echoes. Impressions, larvae, signs that go back to time; a matter which becomes spiritual, which assumes more and more fantastic connotations. Tessari had a long training initially in technical pictorial aspects. He has attended the Istituto d’Arte and the Accademia, he has worked as restorer and copyist, he has studied the ancient masters for a long time, he has appropriated several technical secrets, from the encaustic to the fresco. In short, he has been able to go back to the roots of the painting profession. Especially in a series of painting (most of them on paper) dating 1984 he has set up his own way to work on the image. It is difficult to list and motivate all the stylistic references. Anyway, they can be summarized in two directions: on one side, the historical phase of Mannerism of the late XVI century, on the other the Surrealism in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Therefore, the most capricious and acrobatic creations of some mannerists especially from the North (from Arcimboldo to Bosch) are welded with the visionary spectrum of the inventions by Max Ernst and Dali’, up to the American followers in the 1940’s (as De Kooning and Gorky). The frottage technique by Ernst, as much as the illusionism of Cagli’s “papers”, are ferments, far away in time, of a dream-like inspiration, almost alchemic, in which the painting matter is sublimed.   The figures of Tessari, especially those most hidden, most shadowy, most disquieting, are solved through magma-like imprints, leaps, spots, obscure folds, nervous filaments, brief touches, tangles, transparencies, very rapid arabesques. Color becomes liquid, shifty, dense of luminous flashes and all the image gives a sensation of a petrified forest, through which we can discern the most symbolically fantastic aspect of nature. In this way, smiles and meditations, looks of Medusa and pathetic grimaces are mixed within a matter that melts in front of our eyes, refusing any physical immanence to become a subtle existential beat. Our sensibility, so neurotic, so introspectively restless, unites with the impossible dream of nostalgia for a beauty that hides behind the branches of history.

 

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