FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SIGN TO THE HERMETIC POETICS Pasquale Di Matteo

Massimo Turlinelli's art transcends fashions and trends, inebriating the observer with a unique and unmistakable style, made up of dreamlike worlds created with colored pencils. An artist who, using only the three primary colors, red, yellow and blue, obtains with his pencils results that amaze for the quality of the colors, where light is an ever-present and never banal element. In capturing what surrounds him, Turlinelli creates dream worlds, recolors his present with new lights and more pleasant shades, eviscerating all the discomfort for the time in which he is forced to live and where he seems to feel in a cage, just like his trees solitary in the midst of vast and uncontaminated landscapes, or the rocks enhanced by suggestive monochromes. In fact, what transpires more than anything else from his works is undoubtedly the sense of loneliness, not only of the man alone, or of those who feel part of a society in which they do not recognize themselves, but of a loneliness that is lived. in the first person also from the planet, alone and prisoner of a humanity as pernicious as it is ungrateful, capable only of exhausting every vital source that the Earth offers. In some works the blue of the sky surmounts worlds of color hidden from the ground, other times the monochromes take on the appearance of photographs taken from above, of deserts and uncontaminated spaces. An even stronger characterization of the artist, aimed at enhancing nature in an increasingly important way, distorting figures and scenes, as if Turlinelli wanted to dissolve the present to reassemble it into different solid forms, using pencils as magic wands with which to overcome the meaning of view, schemes, rules and crumbling stereotypes, to bring our time back to a new humanism, a naturalist humanism in which the protagonist is no longer man, but the planet Earth. The Tuscan artist, through his works, creates today places where only a few elements and emptiness reign, at other times intertwining human faces and branches, in an evident desire to return to a cohesion between man and environment that clashes with the laws of progress. The artist, however, is also a philosopher of our time, since in his art there are many signs and symbols with which he speaks to us about the world of the image and of fashion now recognized as the absolute truth to stop at the apical layer of things, image all to be savored quickly, to then burn it, forget it and replace it with another. Conical shadows of round trees, or trees moved several meters, or, again, different species hidden in what appear to be other dimensions, represent the warning that the artist addresses to each of us to strive to go beyond superficiality, to seek essence, people, as concepts. Yet, despite the many complaints declined in his works, the artist nourishes a visceral sense of hope, as if a dark force reassured him about the future, so much so that it manifests itself in scraps of light in the background or in the many horizons. In his artistic career, Turlinelli experiments with communication styles that wink at Surrealism and Pop Art, without being entranced by them, but continuing to soften the colors with an unmistakable hazy touch, thanks to which he tells the sensations that arose from living daily through a high grammatical form of color, which allows him to transform the cries of his soul into works of art. In Turlinelli's most recent art, colors tend to become neutral, eventually slipping into monochrome. Even the signs change, at least partially abandoning the representation of reality, to give space to informal games in which the artist seems to bring together the emotions, which now find greater expression in the intimacy of the unconscious. Colors that recall the attachment to the earth suggest that the artist hopes for an even more overbearing reconciliation between man and nature, softening the problems of our present, linked to the environment, but also denouncing the philosophical detachment from those that are the values ​​of the past. Turlinelli's pencils fill monochromes that look like wedges of earth or rocks, cuttings of nature to cling to, to which to give a different light, wedges of the environment to take care of for the coexistence of every form of life. Massimo Turlinelli is a poet of color, narrator of the age in which we live, capable of communicating his life in a time that seems too narrow to him and that he would like to replace with the worlds that decline in his colors, where green often prevails, color of nature, of inner calm and, together with white, color of hope.

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