OTTO luogo dell’arte inaugurates Radura (Clearing), a one-man show by multifaceted artist and architect Mauro Lovi. Through painting, drawing and architectural installation, the artist interprets the gallery’s spaces as a possible clearing. The trail begins with a large (over 5 meters long and 2.5 meters high) oil painting, continues with an installation of small drawings of different sizes which fill an entire wall, and a pine house (120cm by 50cm by 200 cm) with a surprise inside.

“Everything started with the Oltreserchio flood that happened around Christmas, 2009. Water invaded my childhood playgrounds: the houses, the fields, the poplar groves and the hunters’ cabins at the mouth of the Serchio river…” the artist writes in the endnotes on this work, in the catalog. “I meditated on two small oil paintings, one of a flooded house and the other of a patch of forest, painted a few years ago…A clearing is always welcome, after you’ve gone through woods, forests and poplar groves, sunk up to your eyeballs in its dampness, mosses and semi-darkness. I went ahead, thinking, feeling and painting the forest inside me, with all the impressions, the evocative and metaphorical implications that the trail suggested. I encountered both the real and symbolic inhabitants of the forest: Pan, the nymphs, the boars, wolves, ogres and various fairy-tale characters…All these reflections, in various forms, are present in the clearing I recreated in the spaces of Otto luogo dell’arte in Florence.”

CATALOG