PTOLEMY

Stefano Mazzolini, Italy

Stefano Mazzolini was born in Parma in 1968. At the age of nine he was nominated for the "Design and City" award organized by the municipality of Parma. In 1989 he graduated as a Master of Art in pictorial decoration at the Paolo Toschi Institute in Parma. He dedicated himself for several years to the restoration and conservation of wall paintings. In 1990 he first lived in London and subsequently moved to New York for a short period. He manifests his graphic style in a gestural and immediate way, the dynamic line creates drops of acrylic on paper. Piloted stains well managed without following drawings and projects, thus replacing the brush with ampoules and spatula. Intriguing portraits, fairy-tale environments and mythological animals are formed, fantastic figures animate a controlled chaos. He creates silhouettes of androgynous subjects, using paper collages to assemble and glue layers of faces that are always hidden and minimal. With mixed acrylic colors and enamels he obtains fabrics, colored skins which he applies on canvas wrapping the work, metal grafts, application of various elements, the subjects are always deliberately ambiguous and free to be interpreted, input to reach our dreams. By cutting the canvas and superimposing it he constructs the painting into sculpture. He manipulates the fabric of the painting bringing the image to three-dimensionality. While on the canvas with oil he expresses his vision of the hidden, evanescent color backgrounds, shaded by transparencies but precise in representing objects, people and intrinsic things and formed by a very complex structure like everything that lives and forms. Hints of cities, landscapes between nature and animals that empathetically interact with detailed objects, convulsive scenarios of neo-modern plans and perspectives, where the vision of man is absent, but still rich in his humanity in every circumstance. With sculpture he strengthens artistic identity. Thus inventing a new three-dimensional representation, an exclusive invention of Lycra sculpture. Resin, a treated and consolidated synthetic fabric, offers a new conception of sculpture, human and alien figures, stylized silhouettes, always suspended between the sacred and the profane, draperies to form characters out of past and revisited in a modern key. In his most recent production the shadow seems to win over the light, luminescence is the common denominator that transfigures the visible into every form, traces a memory with outlines of dazzling impulses as if to reveal the soul that every living and non-living form generates the same matter. They emerge like many electric discharges, traces that the deterioration of time leads to the disintegration of the material itself, creating holes of absence, discrepancies in the fabric which between the textures of the physical composition generates a sort of memory of the subject, thus telling the true origins of the depicted subject. Characters, still life's, inventions, bodies, objects are depicted in a restless expressiveness as if passed through a memory scanner, a slab of the past in which it lived on its own energy and today with the degradation of time the aura of memory remains. A cosmos of things and facts to remain in balance between figuration and abstraction.