Maurizio Vanni

The tree, symbol of continously evolving life and the rise towards the infinite, evokes the cyclical nature of cosmic transformation: death, re-generation and re-birth. In the imagination of every person lucky enough to live in thickly wooded territories, dense with underbrush and forests, the tree represents the protection afforded by a house built among its branches, or the goalposts in a football game, shelter from a sudden rain, the smell of nature in its essence and a hymn to life through its potent vitality. Mauro Lovi, in this work-cycle, has appropriated wood not only as a prized palimpsest, but as an active painting surface for several compositions in which trees, especially poplars, are the undiscussed and indisputable protagonists. In many of his works, in fact, the plant’s realism is rendered by removing the subject from its surface through the building up of the background. The wooden painting surface is so self-referential that Lovi leaves it as is, in its natural color, contaminating it only to accentuate its relationship to the truth. Chestnut-groves, forests and woods: everything seems to be structured around absence: of figures, of certain color-schemes, of traditional shading, of academic line and the illusion of perspective. Soon, however, we realize how much Lovi assigns to each of us an active and fundamental role, that we may participate in his work. Every composition, in fact, opens itself to the viewer as a land to conquer, an existential moment to share, a suffocated shout to be perceived: a journey of discovery and re-discovery designed to lead every visitor from the woods to the clearing, from the dark shadows of the thicket into sunlight, from the labyrinth of a wild poplar-grove to the soul’s salvation.
According to Greek mythology, the poplar tree was sacred to Hericles: when the hero descended to the underworld, he made himself a crown of poplar boughs. The sides of the leaves turned towards him remained light, while the sides facing out took on the color of smoke. The mythical origin of leaves’ two colors is thus derived, also their symbological meaning: that of every being’s duality.
Mauro Lovi isn’t concerned with the logical analysis of nature. Neither does he ask himself philosophical and existential questions. Each of his works could be considered a tessera in a story-mosaic, a piece of an infinite puzzle which generates and re-generates itself through interaction with the inherent energy of wood. Beginning with the presupposition that Lovi, in this particular body of his work, saves wood from certain death–bringing the plant back to life; perpetuating the wood’s external structure and its soul through his artwork–in several of his painted structures, it’s as though he were suggesting an Ariadne’s Thread that might lead us, more or less directly, to the clearing. Every individual supposedly needs open space to manifest his own being and to rediscover, along with his own interior life, a natural conversation with the forest’s inhabitants. This painter from Lucca proposes a journey which is at once memorial and ideal: only through fantasy can each person engage in dialog with the poplar-grove’s residents, meet the animals who live there and play with the nymphs–taking care, naturally, not to anger Pan.
The art of our time can’t be enjoyed through sight alone. Lovi’s visual proposals open themselves only to those who wish to experience them emotionally, through the interaction of the five senses. Only then will the gray color-schemes transform themselves into the “vivid candy-colors of Hansel and Gretel’s marzipan house”. The Otto Luogo dell’Arte exhibition space presents itself as an ideal place for enjoyment, like an uncontaminated marzipan house where everything, but also the opposite of everything, is possible. A magical, enchanted place which will occasionally transform itself into a microcosm able to contain fairy-tales and stories, thoughts and states-of-mind, visual poems and concepts fashioned by the hand of man. A privileged space in which the universe’s energies will make each visitor feel like the absolute protagonist of his own existence. Man, author of his own destiny, chooses the forest as protection or escape from the world, chases his own dreams to emerge from the dark forest and exalts the clearing as his existential objective. Lovi wants to tell us a fairy-tale. We have to believe him.

Maurizio Vanni