ANOTHER NATURE Nunzio Giustozzi
DI-VISIONS Gerardo De Simone
THE DREAM CONJECTURES Donato Massaro
111 - WORKS OF MASSIMO TURLINELLI Giovanna Cardini
MASSIMO TURLINELLI, PAINTER AND ARCHITECT Lia Bronzi
POLYCHROME EMOTIONS Franco Manescalchi
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MAN AND NATURE Paola Mancinelli
OFTEN IT HAPPENED TO ME Emilio Daddi
MASSIMO TURLINELLI OR THE CONSTANCY OF REASON Ugo Barlozzetti
"Being does not mean to appear but to stand out, and the distinction occurs when your personality is recognizable among billions of people. There are'nt possible connections or links to what the world and its history has taught us, there's only a profound and unique expression form, projected into a tomorrow that nobody knows. Massimo Turlinelli, like it or not, is him. Massimo Turlinelli, he is able to caress the present in the imposition of the future."
Fausto Brozzi
ANOTHER NATURE Nunzio Giustozzi
We are the last light of a sunset and we will be, after a long night, the future sunrise.
Giovanni Segantini
In comparison with the ephemeral and abstruse manifestations Contemporary Art, Massimo Turlinelli's paintings celebrate a conscious, necessary and long awaited return to Nature. The amazement, the enchantment towards the spectacle of Creation, of Beauty is at the origin of his sensibility, together Aristotelian wonder, knowledge foundation, cause the art knows how to make visible what always isn't, taking part in the world genesis. It thus proceeds from the visual, emotional, experience to invest its landscapes of meanings, to create, therefore, another Nature, like a wise demiurge, in a delicate balance between the rule and the feeling, intimately convinced that the Sublime doesn't reside in the object, in the external fact but in the soul of the one who judges it. Though, his gaze on reality, remains, at first, as the look" of a clever fawn or skylark" ‒ as Ruskin about Constable ‒ in the observation of the truth, and, for the topicality of the places where he was born and lived, and of the places he frequents every day, the places where he always is traveling through the Tuscan and Marche's rolling hills: soft meadows where the grass is humid, fields combed by man and history, embankments in plan or in askance, trees alone or in a row on a plowed hill, with roots that sink into the ground and foliage planted in immense and bright skies that crush the horizon to a thread from the ground, until it disappears. Familiar glimpses to reveal, however, unexpected shots from heterodox perspectives, impressions awakened by the changing reflections of light as the atmospheric conditions change, they are caught en plein air and, then, processed in the study, slowly, with the eyes of the mind, in the highly calculated final compositions, preceded by studies of minor proportion, revealing the rigor of a method. For these he often resorts to square formats of Renaissance perfection, to landscapes of enlightenment style, to the golden section and to the most beautiful geometric scans that in a watermark betray a structural approach, due to architect's education, tempered by the lyricism of colors and the infinite depth of pure graphite. From the real Turlinelli he also studies the native color, that's the color that things have in the sunlight, representing it with a vast tones's range, for example, of green for the vegetation figuration: as Giuseppe Pende, his charismatic mentor at the 'Preziotti' Institute of Art in Fermo, had taught him in class and in the pleasant and instructive walks to the river or on the seashore, during which he has acquired to the students a wealth of knowledge on the shading, on the contrast of the complementary ones, on a whole series of visual elements through the collection of poor materials that he brought to the classroom for life drawing when there was talk about the different color theories to concretely test the scientific principles under discussion. This safe and precious imprinting makes it seem obvious to build the shapes in a selected and rarefied subtractive color range which resolves into the happy combination of the three primary colors (cyan, magenta, yellow) with the abomination of black. The careful examination of the technique of the light painters, whose touch, with their blue shades, from France to Italy migrated from point to comma, will guide him in the daring ordeal of the use of colored pencils on the desk, still modern support, with results of an incomparable lightness, of a constant stylistic coherence. This fact, to know how to understand, is surprising because, in stopping the time of the most deceptive appearances of phenomenal perception, like those misty morning visions that evaporate towards the monochrome, the maximum of relativism becomes rational, purified artifice between figuration and abstraction. So, sometimes, the works are loaded with an unknown and inaccessible dimension, if not with the tools of the imagination, when the sudden close-ups exclude a lot, with the attempt to investigate by synthesis and not by simplification the part for the whole, in a syntax that isolates alphabets of a very personal, dreamlike, surreal language. So, in the absence of Cartesian coordinates that orient us from every side and in every direction, in an atmosphere suspended in the silence of human life, where magical presences project metaphysical, parallel shadows, mysterious, metamorphic ones of incommensurable length, when outlined shapes by vocation we contemplate in the overwhelming vastness of the universe, one has the impression that the eyelids are cut off and the void becomes the theme of the landscape so that you can look at it, without holds, even upside down and with your feet in the air (Kleist and Goethe about Friedrich). Sometimes a threshold appears, a leopardian boundary that limits sight, a conceptual and explicit citation of a non-wall as a visible thought that allows us to glimpse and recognize in a near or far distant place the symbolic forest of his poetic, those branches bare or leafy that intertwine in the air and respond immovably or levitating to the scream of a graffiti wall. Don't be surprised that it's the tree, therefore, which assumes a totemic role within the painter's imagery through allegory and formal seduction: it is itself a perfect cosmos, participates in all the elements. Trees are friends, brothers who precede us and show us the way; talking with them puts us in front of our freedom, they give everything that's essential for us to life. It's a pleasure to caress their gnarled bark, to feel the flow of the sap. They are like people, they breathe, they talk to each other and sometimes they marry, in the distance, the tall and straight cypress and the sensual pine, between the hills of the Val d'Orcia as in the ancestral, powerful rites between Lucania and Pollino. A wide foliage crown can be guessed in a blink of an eye in the iris of the great glaucous eye that sees everything and nothing forgets: a cut out and magnify portions of truth, without the vulgarization from which Pop Art or hyper realism had let themselves be tempted, without not even wanting to recreate - other times it happens - the semantic shock of Magritte with the alienating association of dissimilar elements or optical mirrors, an harbinger of a replicated, multiplied objectivity. His works contain secrets, all revealed in the dilatation of accuracy that allows the precision of the pencil in approaching carefully and achieving a stunning realism, paradoxically arriving to touch abstract art. It can be seen from the nourished anthology of color fields crossed by thick textile textures, a juxtaposition sometimes interrupted, in some places, impulsive graphic gestures, craquelure, labyrinths and warps that, like capillaries, they sprinkle intense surfaces of delicate tonal passages or more saturated backgrounds in dense focused, which become woods, wave, wrinkle, cloud, fog, petal, bight, Northern Lights, sunset. In the spiritual soul of color, the artist loves to plunge and shipwrecked in search of the kingdom of the blue flower, an inexhaustible longing for happiness.
DI-VISIONS Gerardo De Simone
Massimo Turlinelli is an observer of the world. The spectacle of Nature is what most fascinates and intrigues him: an incessant source of wonder, mystery, knowledge. The central point of his artistic research lies in the combined process of perception and representation: a way of translating into images, into works of art, the impressions captured by the eye, remedied by the mind, relived intimately. The root of his language is in the painting of French post-impressionists and Italian symbolists: the vision is recomposed on the support through a long, methodical, studied application of pencil and pastel touches (whose selective color range is reduced to graphite and three fundamental colors), point-like signs that acquire recognizable concretion through their calculated aggregation, like a dust chaos that gradually becomes shape and color.
THE DREAM CONJECTURES Donato Massaro
The first thing that moves when you look at the works of Massimo Turlinelli is the skilful arrangement of the colors: it's an intelligent and loving chromatism that the artist unfolds with his colored pencils. Yes: we are talking about pencils, even if it'sn so evident, such is the yield in terms of backgrounds and shades, so much so that one remains, to know it, speechless. Pencils like the ones that all children, and we also, when we were childs, use in their first approaches to drawing, to discover the world of colors and the world around them, happy to represent it, with the help of an explosive imagination. Children's imagination is unbridled and authentic, revealing and,almost always, playful. It expresses moods and perhaps unconscious awareness that are acquired in those works in progress during that age characterized by discoveries and curiosities, statements and questions. Children have artists' imaginations, but vice versa haven't always. In the case of Massimo Turlinelli, however, yes, he has it. And his world is colored in joy to propose a reality that's fantastic and concrete, imagined and real. His paintings have the cleanliness of representation and the candor of childhood. With the difference that if the children, in the end, just have fun while educating themselves to beauty and life, the artist is consciously looking for a figurative language and a complete sense of the distinctly idea about representing the world and living it. The artist is an inventor of worlds. Therefore, existential roots are those that support his research which develops, not only in metaphor, the idea of growth. Indeed, the frequent vision in Turlinelli's works is the countryside with all the plant syntax of his landscapes in geometries of views about the life cycle. The proud and undisturbed pines and cypresses, also captured in close-ups like movie stars, dominate the scene. Turlinelli, who is an architect, evidently even more the spectacular constructive wisdom of nature appreciates, the spontaneous and the organized by man: therefore, nature is the protagonist of his work. Still a harmonious nature that keeps its promises. And it's a singular case that he, a native of G. Leopardi's lands, has, compared to the great poet, his fellow citizen, a disposition of mind of gratitude without recriminations towards him in full immersion and harmony, without taking anything away from the equally complex existential reflection. Nature speaks to him smiling and luxuriant, especially when it wakes up in spring when it seduces us even more than usual and makes itself beautiful just for us. Full immersions that allow him to portray it in confidence with lyrical and dreamy enthusiasm. Artistically, therefore, his painting is, we could say, a dreamlike impressionism to convey a vision of the world between the natural solar and the intellectual surreal, with an optimism of the will capable to recreate the landscapes with visually delighting and intellectually problematic pictorial spaces. All this going well beyond the photographic excesses of our time, he thus tries to restore to the metropolitan man that confidence with the environment compromised by urban excesses, accentuating its lyricism. In performing so, he finds again the simplicity and candor of children as a conscious artist who, in their drawings still they know how to amaze and fantasize and dream. The conjectures of the dream make a pine perhaps let go of its foliage free in the blue of the sky in which space it hovers, a pine with a wide permanent crown, which likes to dream and fly in the blue. Those conjectures are indefinable and suggestive and you never know if they come from the unconscious or from desire. And it happens that mountains appear between profiles of mists as if by magic, and that intertwining branches draw hidden warps perhaps even indecipherable, or combinations of colors narrate hidden plots of mysterious meanings flashing to the mind in the moments of half-sleep as if it were the story of a fairy tale , listening to which one falls asleep peacefully between shadows and gloom, the life that is given to us to live between reality and dreams and you don't know what is better, and then, painting both of them, you try to live them both but awake to daydream and keep its secret.
111 - WORKS OF MASSIMO TURLINELLI Giovanna Cardini
"It's a painter's duty to be completely absorbed in nature and use all his intelligence to express sentiment, so that his work is intelligible to others", wrote Vincent Van Gogh, an extraordinary lover of drawing intended as the genesis of every pictorial work. Faithful to the same conviction, the contemporary artist Massimo Turlinelli makes the architecture of all his work from rigorous drawing, that magical and alchemical project through which it is possible to give body to an image by tracing signs and lines on a surface of support; and it is no coincidence that Turlinelli, who improvises nothing, draws the precious subjects-objects of his works directly from nature. Fields or skies, above all, he offers them to the viewer in infinite possibilities and then, fruits, pines and cypresses seen from near and far, whole or sectioned, upside down. Sometimes, the reference image is completely lost in the background, and gives way to tangles of colored and indistinct threads with a strong visual and also emotional impact. Using exclusively red, yellow and blue pencils, the artist marks the relationships between shapes and space, while the colors change according to how they are juxtaposed, or superimposed, and according to the intensity with which they are applied. Aware of the time it takes to create his complex representations, Turlinelli seems to want to recall the viewer to a meditation intended as a return to oneself, to the distance between what it is and what it seems: his drawings, which the eye can 'to perceive as paintings, they have the flavor of letters never sent, used to metaphorically describe a perfect dream, known and in any case mysterious, interrogated at length and then staged 111 times. With passion and patience.
MASSIMO TURLINELLI, PAINTER AND ARCHITECT Lia Bronzi
Massimo Turlinelli, painter and architect in Florence, innervates his images 'at the tip of a pencil', framing them in three basic colors: yellow, red, blue, and in real, ideal, and dreamlike landscape contexts, designed to tell an archetypal fable inclined to a strenuous elegance for the rarefied intellectualism that it proposes, with a moderately neoplatonic flavor, where there is no lack of 'vis morale' for the symbolic and ideal Edenic allusiveness, in which the rhythmic drawing theme appears decisive to us, for the structural possibilities that unfold between value essentially melodic, in areas of delicate color and articulated dialectical structure. And this is how the figural reality from which the artist moves, becomes intellect, contemplation and therefore an idea, an idea capable of representing icons and also types rooted in the depths of the human soul, always in symbiotic contact with the cosmos, according to a secret, but yet communicable and reworkable, intuition, in total freedom, made it with the 'pencil tip' technique. An epistemic trace, therefore, which must be evaluated according to three autonomous components: pragmatics, semantics, syntactic, in order to obtain a visibility tending towards Unity, while evocation, as memory, serves to achieve the liberation of life everyday and existential with useless frills, as can be seen from the essentiality of the design and a clear, harmonious and polychromatic color, where the dream ignites the poetic imagination, in the user, in a magic of light. We are certainly facing an innovative artist in terms of techniques and themes, who has created a lot and still has a lot to say.