Mario Tessari

Ugo Perniola, 1985

(translated by Leda Cempellin) Tessari is a prudish painter, far from mysterious pulses, who looks without anxieties and through an ancient profession for a possible “new” in representational art. Indeed, the composed flow of dense energies in his painting gestures is more a nostalgic love for past ages, than instinctive interaction. The degree of development of his inspiration relies on an outstreched mood, but also on a prominent and morally binding correlation with an illustrious past, where life in its flow makes a sense that has to be translated also in artistic terms. The incommunicability, abundantly expressed through essential monochromes, is the space of a new epiphany: in the uncertain monster of difference, the unsuspected monster that harbors in us is conceptually revealed. A “secularly” religious language holds the volume of the message, which expands through time even stylistically as light, forming a continuity that is mental and calligraphic at the same time. The original dream-like quality unravels for a more perfect identification of the human dimension, underlined through a colorful effect, which rises from the oils, through a more extensive elaboration of the basic monochrome, to the fresco technique. In his painting, a solemn visceral quality emerges from the fusion of the architectural frame of Bosch and the transparence of Brueghel; color, made of several velvet layers, aims to three-dimensionality, not blocked and closed, but with a singularly oxygenated background. The paint material is fresh, almost evanescent, and presents as subject the human being in his double “façade” symbolically sexual (the façade in the history of architecture is the visible and typological part, immediately representing the overall structure of the building which introduces to its interior space). The prevalence of the feminine in the pictorial tangle of Tessari is the emblem of the prevalence of the exterior “façade” over the interior one (the man, intended as situation, as flow, subjected to any form of limitation, but also to solvent hope).   In the painting of Tessari, nothing is left to chance; the same frame, which limits the “façade”, accompanies and concludes the work. His painting is certainly devoted to a happy destiny, for the acute spirit of the research that supports him.

 

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