In this moment in history, art is a multifaceted and fluctuating experience, made of extremely different and often dissonant voices. Still, from time to time you happen to come across true painting. By saying that, I am not denying my several times proudly proclaimed passion for the most modern languages of neopop art, for flat graphic elements created in the digital era, or for the latest sophisticated frontiers of concept art. Still I would like to emphasize that painting in its strictest sense is the one created by the great tradition and has grown thanks to the battles of avant-guardes, fed by sweat, tears and blood, is a strand in itself, extremely defined and accurate, with its own peculiar features and rules. A dragging river that has kept flowing in our contemporary history – partly submerged, partly on the surface – always pure and vigorous.
The work of Massimo Lagrotteria absolutely belongs to that river. A few years ago, in his New York views, you could feel the deep pictorial nature that distinguishes the artist. They were clean, extremely clear and airy images, created from a careful attention to spatial balances and with an exquisite use of light. Elements of a highly relevant perspective at the time – that of metropolitan scenes – those images stood out from the background for the vibrations conveyed, nearly of an impressionistic style, that Lagrotteria so wonderfully combined with a taste for the tiny details. But even then, what would become the most typical and personal style of the artist was taking shape: the figure. Of the face, in particular. On wrapping paper, paper and canvas, you could notice the first traces of his mature painting, of that accomplished style we appreciate in his works today.
A tireless experimenter, constantly in love with the painting materials, over the years Lagrotteria has also tested cardboard, iron, copper; and from each element he has been able to let out a new and extremely pure voice, still always solidly consistent with the context of his poetry. They were trails of colour on the coarse texture of the canvas or silky and perfectly smooth shades, brushstrokes pleasantly applied on the metal. In the works currently on exhibition – on dark backgrounds, often bitumen-based, indefinite spaces made of shadows, sometimes melted in liquid drippings that create striking interplays of levels – the faces and figures stand out extremely pale and bright. Sometimes they are barely defined, covered in a sacral aura like contemporary shrouds (and his usual choice of leaving the eyes closed emphasises the mystical beauty), some others are cleaner and well-defined, brightened by an inner light, as if they were icons of a daily life in which the glory is no more a matter of heroic and legendary lives, but it is rather an extemporary event, of a transient nature, that is resolved (and dissolved) within minutes.
They are hieratic figures, of an ancient grace, spectral young girls with a moon-pale, vaguely livid skin, rendered through a masterful use of the pictorial matter; faces that seem to catch the light from a universal pinkish translucency, almost more spiritual than physical. With a power of language that brings Lagrotteria’s works close to Marlene Dumas or Maria Lassnig’s poetry, with a capacity to capture the soul in the face that in certain aspects reminds Lucien Freud and a sense of spiritual and oneiric, not far from the path of the Italian Nicola Samorì, Massimo Lagrotteria creates a gallery of figures that are not simply men and women, but they look like pure mankind. A contemporary mankind, often defeated and sore. The divers who look as if they had been stolen from attic vases, the massive sumo fighters, the children with their enchanted and charming gaze carry the values of us all. The same applies to the sculptured figures. Little men so dignified inside their consumed poor bodies, crushed and still in search of those fifteen minutes of glory that one day – now a long time ago – a man called Andy Warhol had promised to everyone. And surely, they would be happy with those fifteen minutes.
Massimo Lagrotteria è quanto di più lontano oggi vi sia da quella forma artistica asettica e un poco impersonale, perché troppo cerebrale, che va per la maggiore (ma ancora per quanto incontrerà i gusti degli appassionati che non speculano sulla bellezza?). Il pittore carpigiano produce dipinti spesso visibilmente animati da un’urgenza linguistica che fa tabula rasa di tante dissonanze con la realtà, troppo spesso altrove poco percepibili in termini profondi dal pubblico. Per Lagrotteria vale allora il contrario, i suoi soggetti – ritratti, soprattutto femminili, e paesaggi urbani – avvicinano i sensi con immediata facilità percettiva, seppur pose ed espressioni delle figure, nonché i “deserti” cittadini, abbiano a prima vista poco di condivisibile con chi guarda, essendo creati per essere guardati più che per essere “condivisi”. E’ proprio il mezzo tecnico, quasi sempre olio su tela o su carta, che crea il primo legame emozionale con chi osserva, perchè i suoi quadri e i disegni non rasentano l’accademismo puro, ma al tempo stesso nemmeno sono troppo distanti, appunto, da una naturale presa di coscienza della realtà. Quest’ultima, intesa come dato verificabile di ogni giorno fermato in un attimo, è sempre stata il faro di Lagrotteria: una realtàriprodotta, mediata, soprattutto nei primi anni di carriera, da immagini fotografiche, da lui scattate o prelevate da vecchie riviste, che gli servivano per elaborare visi e scene nei dipinti, poi trasformata in riproduzione di realtà-reale vissuta, lampi di episodi privati, come viaggi o incontri amichevoli, poi amplificati sulla superficie dove danno vita a una iconografia, ormai molto ampia, fatta di figure dalle pose a volte contorte e a volte richiamanti la ritrattistica rinascimentale, e da scorci di città dove il dato umano è pressoché assente e comunque assolutamente accessorio. Lagrotteria si inserisce senz’altro in quel filone di importanti esponenti del nuovo New Deal pittorico (all’estero annovera artisti di grande importanza come Marlene Dumas e Jenny Saville), mutuato da grandi del passato novecentesco come Freud e Bacon, sul quale ancora troppi critici ogni giorno danno prova di scarsa riflessione, molti a favore come sono di elaborate teorie a volte poco costruttive e cervellotiche, ma “modaiole” e mercantili. Per fortuna un grande intellettuale come Gillo Dorfles, lo ricordava di recente lo studioso Vincenzo Trione, sta contribuendo a riportare la barra a favore del «recupero della carica misteriosa del colore». E’ proprio questo ritorno potente della pittura-pittura la stella polare di Massimo Lagrotteria. L’urgenza linguistica dell’artista ora si volge anche in direzione della plastica, probabilmente per lui dunque inizia a essere impellente la necessità di portare nella terza dimensione la sua presa di coscienza del reale.