Mauro Maffezzoni, 3D

Room 15

«I am a stubborn creator: this stubbornness of mine, which can be translated more simply as “hard-headedness”, is part of my nature, but it was certainly reinforced when I was an athlete. I was a canoe champion, in my team there were world champions, European champions and Italian champions, I was an Italian champion and part of the national team, our duty, which is a kind of first commandment for an athlete, said never give up and I, with all those champions as a model, I have always applied this motto even when I hung up my paddle and gave myself up to art. I have maintained an athletic mentality, I don’t know if it works, but I’m fine with it, I work constantly to keep myself trained, I train my mind to keep it supple and fresh. Each of my paintings, each of my sculptures is an athletic performance, like a 500 or 1000 metre race in C1 (Canadian Olympic canoe, my boat, a real work of art). And the canoe is also a symbol of movement, you have to know the river, you have to be able to read the current in order to know how to ascend it or to avoid the turns of water or make the most of its strength. In art, I am a canoeist who travels and gets lost in the water, I follow the currents or go upstream, I turn with force and make sudden jumps. I have fun.»
Mauro Maffezzoni

«We find the concepts of “shuffle” and “playlist” in Mauro Maffezzoni’s artistic research. He paints anything that strikes his fancy, without any apparent selective criteria: a landscape seen from the train, a fashion image found in a magazine, a famous painting from the past, a news episode or an advertisement. For this artist, with his omnivorous visionary nature, there is nothing that does not deserve to be put on canvas. Another musical term that often occurs in Maffezzoni’s work is “cover”. In fact, the artist often re-paints famous paintings by masters of art history. As in the case of music covers, in which old songs are taken up and re-arranged, “pictorial glories” of the past are rediscovered and re-proposed according to an apparently random criterion, as if they came out of a jukebox of art history. Maffezzoni’s work can be defined as rhizomatic (which conceives of the development of human knowledge as a horizontal, interconnected and multidiscilinear expansion) because it does not favour any particular object, style or trend, but instead embraces all subjects, genres, styles and periods.»
Alessandra Galasso

THE ARTIST

Mauro Maffezzoni was born in Rovereto in 1960. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and now lives and works between Milan and Cremona. In 2006 he exhibited Cover Cremonesi at the Ala Ponzone Civic Museum in Cremona and in 2007 he held the exhibition Painting shuffle at the Luisa Delle Piane Gallery in Milan. His work has always been directed towards a painting of covers, views and strange images by which his imagination is struck. Here he presents his sculptures for the first time.