Isa Tutino

Architect, painter, sculpture, graphic artist, designer, art director, planner of suggestive displays, installations, gardens and art parks, inventor of exhibits and events, author of prize-winning books, effective catalyst of creative energies, subtle story-teller, Mauro Lovi is above all a person endowed with a gentleness of spirit so profound and sensitive as to induce poetry in all he creates. I can make this claim, since I’ve known him for a quarter-century. For example’s sake, I suggest one of his demanding works, an environment with the mural painting “Proteus’ Dream”, created in the early 90s for Agneta Holst’s Megalopoli in Milan, which was featured on the cover of Casa Vogue, the magazine I was then directing; we’ve had many other happy oppurtunities to collaborate.
The memory of a well-studied and well-loved 20th century surrealism has always been legible in his artwork; but this is intimately transfigured, like nostalgia for a lost, but nevertheless vivid, childhood landscape.
Now I’m happy that Olivia Toscani’s new exhibition space, Otto Luogo dell’Arte, has chosen him, as well as its art director, above all as the author of the one-man show destined to inaugruate the multiform activities of this center, which holds so much promise.
The pictures in this show somehow reminded me, in their elegant amazement, which is both candid and cultivated, the beautiful book of poetic watercolors Lovi dedicated, 16 years ago, to the walls of his beloved city. Lucca. Walks and passages; walls seen as a walkway that embraces the city, possesses it; walls as an attempt to form an island in a green sea, but also to enclose a rich storehouse of stimuli for childhood games and adolescent dreams, where something magical can always be expected.
The pictures in this show too have a mysterious side, which induces reverie: like the blind doorway facing onto a sea so flat and calm it might as well be a swimming pool, which keeps beside it only a symbolic shadow cast by a maritime pine tree: where did this doorway lead, before it was walled up? What lies beyond it? What’s hiding behind that non-opening?
And who is the woolly, oblong, striped creature who lives among the roots of certain tree-trunks, in a foggy and probably snow-bound forest?
And where are the treetops of these forests, thick as they are with chiaroscuro, dappled with multicolored light-play, thick with smooth trunks, simply forked at the tops, like giant slingshots, but absolutely peaceful, not menacing–playful, rather; friendly and serene, only delicately alluding to the perplexity which any dark woods instill in the wayfarer? (Suffice it to recall Caspar David Friedrich’s beautiful painting “The Evening”, and the confusion one feels upon spotting the two tiny figures nearly lost in the great woods at sunset).
At times, they seem like the silvery trunks of birches, like those in beautiful northern forests; but the light that smashes into a thousand iridescences is decidedly Mediterranean. Other trunks have dark blotches, like lime trees, or, more often, the homely clarity of poplars. But any botanical investigation seems superfluous in these forests of the soul, which push any possible wolves to their furthest boundaries, in order that young maidens may walk through unmolested.
And is that pentagonal form in the woods’ center, shaded purple and violet by the evening, a bundle of twigs, or a hunter’s shack, or, more likely, Hansel and Gretel’s house?
We can more clearly identify the fairy-tale characters as the house-sculpture’s occupants, once we discover it contains their marzipan sweets.
And who’s just risen from a solitary stool on the shore of small body of water that seems to invite meditative contemplations as much as or more than a vast ocean?
As always, as in all of his creations, in these paintings of forests and clearings, where the wind easily passes through, Mauro Lovi recounts his poetic search for an order that is not merely personal, among the general spreading confusion, and an unquenchable thirst for infinite freedom of the heart and mind.
In the distant, nearly mythical 1960s, there was a song in which Gino Paoli dreamed of a house with trees instead of walls; and we dreamt along with him. Whoever acquires Mauro Lovi’s fantastic magical forest triptych will see this dream made reality: his house will not only have trees instead of mere walls, but will also possess the light, that beautiful light which the trembling of poplar leaves filters and kaleidoscopically transforms into a festival of colors, an entire new world of suggestions, evocations, visions. A lucky person, whoever it turns out to be.

Isa Tutino