The great painting of an anachronistic and anti-modern Author. criticism by Mario Penelope
criticism by Mario Penelope
Bruno Di Maio has long pursued a coherent and highly personalized path that, with a rational, solitary and autonomous conscience, has cut those bridges that link it to the historical avant-gardes of modern art, as in the traditional figurative vein.
Di Maio, with a rigorous and timid individuality, keeps away from the programs. And it doesn’t let himself be dazzled by the mirage of the multiple enticements coming from the play of aesthetic tendencies to fashion, from time to time circulated by certain estheticians-managers.
At first sight we are tempted to catalog his work in that tide of plethoric images spread by the citationists, who for some time has been spreading in the field of art.
But then we realize that his painting is in a position of different and contrasting understandings compared to the proposals of the citationists. An even more anachronistic and “anti-modern” position, which undoubtedly puts on display, almost with vanity, its absolute freedom to love, without false modesty and with deep nostalgia, classical painting. But at the same time he wants to subtract himself from any explicit reference to the iconography of ancient art and to every ambiguous museum ancestry.
For Di Maio to collect today the legacy of Renaissance classicism means to make a re-examination of that return to the craft of dechirichian memory, with the awareness of making current and regenerating the evocative quality of yesterday’s language for today’s story.
The temptation to resume the discourse on the historical substance of the tradition of the great Italian manner is felt in the compositional cut from the Baroque richness and in the psychological intonation of his work.
And there is the call of a magniloquent painting, happy, carnal, interwoven with light-color and color-form, where the elements of its repertoire are brought to the utmost lyric tension, impregnated with poetry made of silent suggestions, without any implication decorative and cultural.
The originality of the vision focuses on the sumptuousness of matter and the chiaroscuro and dramatic immanence of light, which glides on objects and bodies, reverberating the penumbra from the deep in continuous abandoning oneself to the impulses and motivations of a story full of shots and surprises, which cause a tumultuous succession of feelings sinking into the humus of nostalgia.
Mario Penelope, 1983