PROTOCOLLAGES

Andrea Mastrovito 

These collages are heralding good and bad personal memories. Good because, after all, they are the first collages I have made in my life. It was summer, more precisely June of 2003, and I was looking for a solution that would have allowed me to leave the areosol bombs I was using in that period – they were too cold and stiff – and I realized that the solution was exactly in front of me: instead of throwing away the paper masks I used to create my aerosol painting, I tried to use directly those masks, sticking one upon the other. Slowly I started to notice that they were – in formal terms – perfect, and they gave me that freedom that I had always experienced in printing from linocuts or in engraving.  Well, I’d say that the actual starting point for my collages has been Munch’s and Hokusai’s xylography and Picasso’s linoleum, and of course Schifano’s anaemic landscapes and Nolde’s watercolours, concerning informal backgrounds. Since then I’ve always kept on this kind of work through the years, side by side with all the other works, as it was a leitmotiv that flows under everything I do, following here as well Emil Nolde’s example, who made all his very simple watercolour paintings in a lifetime, while his mainstream work was proceding always in different directions. Until today, I modified my collages with passing of time, reinterpreting them white on white, sobstituting paper and glue to tissue paper and pins, reinventing them digging in paperboard or nailing papers on walls, but alway representing a cathartic moment – as for my drawings – where I can stop and make the point of the situation. Ah, as I was saying at the beginning: bad memories. I spent a week, between 3th and 10th June, locked in my home, in my own garage, cutting paper without talking to anybody, barely eating, and I never saw the sunshine for the anger and the annoyance I had. The theme of all these collages, the war, come out from these feelings. It was summer and we had just recided in second league after the famous play-off against Reggina. What a disappointment. Unfortunately I still remember clearly everything, from Natali’s illusive goal to Taibi’s bullshit to all the curses and – overall – the aftermatch fights. Hours and hours of fighting. Those are the base of these collages of mine, that feeling of useless defeat. Of course telling it could seem banal, but try to live it.