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.