Senza bussare | Matteo Massagrande Catalogo

Catalogo Senza Bussare, della mostra personale di Matteo Massagrande.

After exhibiting alongside the works of Van Gogh and in the prestigious Fralin Museum of Art (USA), MATTEO MASSAGRANDE returns to PUNTO SULL’ARTE. SENZA BUSSARE marks a great comeback for the artist who, since 2017, had not held solo exhibitions in private spaces in Italy. In recent years, the artist has been involved in important prestigious museum exhibitions both in Italy and abroad.  These include “Canto dolente d’amore (last day of Van Gogh)” at the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza,  In 2018 “In my room: artists paint the interior 1950-NOW”, at The Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville USA. “Around Van Gogh” at the Centro San Gaetano in Padua in 2021

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a verse by the Hungarian poet Jòzsef Attila, «You can enter without knocking once I have fallen in love with you», indicating how one enters the rooms painted by Massagrande in absolute freedom, without constraint, with the complete ability to marvel at a detail, a colour, an object. Alongside the most beloved objects, the interiors touched by the sun’s first rays, the verandas like eyes over the blue of the sea, a body of works tells of Greece, its lights and smells, the patches of green around the houses, the vine in front of the entrance. An almost magical landscape, reproduced superbly, thanks to long and refined colouristic research, which with time has become almost a philosophical challenge.

For Massagrande that which gives life to a painting is a particular state of mind, almost a shiver, not the emotion of the moment. «I have never wanted to “stop the moment”, as in nineteenth-century Parisian painting, which focused on the moment and represented immobility, instead I would like movement to become eternal. Mine are emphasized moments, in the paintings I weave praise of everyday life, of normality”», we read in the show’s critical text.

«Every day we eat bread, and every day it seems new again, so crunchy and fragrant, we never get used to it, yet we always taste it: this is what I want for my paintings, where everyday life is neither ironic or monotonous, and there is the beauty of the known. As a child I observed the closed rooms, you could say I spied on them: not anymore, they must lead to something else, otherwise the painting becomes a still life of chairs and furniture».

Culture is when one notices the simple things, Massagrande loves to say, and the simple complication of his canvases invites us to understand that at the end, what lives in those empty and luminous rooms, where one can enter without knocking, is none other than our souls.