“ As the chisel
carves the stone
to bring out a shape,
so you impressed my life
the
space of love…”
In these verses by Mario
da Corgeno, an
authentic, Michel-Angelistic
lapicide, lies the
erotic mystery of a
sculptural shape,
vocative and evocative,
which admirably expands
as tangle and
development of plastic
tensions.
The work of Mario da
Corgeno – it must be
stated – brings inside
itself and with itself
the precious inheritance
of twenty years of
secluded and sorrowful
work, stubbornly
sheltered from society,
of a long and tender
soliloquy with the
bright and painful
beauty of life. In fact,
during the last two
decades the artist has
acted as the witness of
an inner dimension of
beauty; a dimension
which is alchemic,
consolatory, a figural
projection of a
spiritual “ego” able to
look at the being
according to the look of
love; love which is, as
in Platone, the
attraction exerted on
the soul by the
pulchrum.
On the lack of sense and
nobility reported by
sensible appearances,
Mario da Corgeno raises
the epos of an
expressive search in the
material and of a
listening of the mystery
of the shape, in an
artistic practice which
repeats the utopia of
the historical
avant-gardes: to make a
work of art of life
itself, the absolute
field of aesthetic. For
the engagé
contemporary review,
“scientifically”
anchored to the notion
of specialisation of
the knowledge and of the
arts, the omnia
work of this unique
artist-farmer
constitutes a sort of
insuperable anomaly, an
“event” to bury with the
simple strategy of
silence. On the other
hand, the work of Mario
da Corgeno, his way of
touching with sovereign
humilitas and
same freedom the
different sides of the
verso, of oil painting,
of drawing, of carving
the stone and the
bronze, of building
wooden household objects
of clever devices; all
this shows what today is
maybe the last true
example of a poetic,
which means the
normative prevalence of
seeing according to an
original size of the
heart which subordinates
and subdues to itself
the empiric of the
ratio and of the
ars.
In the corpus of Mario
da Corgeno everything
springs up from a single
original matrix called
life; life as motherhood
which generates basic
values such as faith,
nature, person,
friendship, compassion
for other people’s
sorrow and pain. A
matrix which shares even
the etymon (matrix,
mater) with the
other category which
brightens up and unveils
the art of Mario da
Corgeno: the mother,
indeed, exhausted sweet
obsession that always
comes back in the
magnetic female figures
of the sculptor, bodies
subjected to an
implacable sublimation
until they reach the
study of pure spiritual
essences. The artist
directs before our eyes
an Eden or a Limbo, an
enchanted forest of
dancing nymph, of
graceful and light
sylph, of mermaids that
flee like the throb of a
vision or the flash of
wings of some womanly
sylvan divinity that
comes to visit us in the
secret time of dreams;
disquieting somatic
simulacrum stretched
into unlikely anatomies,
in expensive balances,
often transfigured into
synthetic shapes that
ascend and expand into a
sinusoidal rhythmic that
also lives on the lunar
white of marble and of
the nocturnal
atmospheres suggested by
the silky patina of the
bronze, in the changing
of opalescent greens,
mineral blues, of browns
as thick as ebony. With
the incidence of the
surface, light here
shows sculpting
morphologies that raise
in happy and native
harmony, with movements
and joints sometimes
darting, sometimes
slackened by the refined
magisterial virtuosity
of a curvilinear course.
For Mario da Corgeno
sculpting through
removing and moulding
becomes a moment of
catharsis and of magic
revelation and panics of
a world of dawning and
virginal beauty,
suspended between the
aesthetical and the
ecstatic. In the
figuration and in the
stylism of Mario da
Corgeno we recognise the
cultured of the great
plastic Italian school,
of the Art Nouveau, of
the European symbol, of
the plastic futuristic
dynamism of Boccioni,
and the touching
pathetism of a Wildt
restored to life.
Really, the sculpting of
Mario da Corgeno has
the shape of the
platonic idea of beauty;
a very intimate shape,
as the expressive
contiguity of the
drawing shows, where the
graphic initial realism
of an annigonian school
and the shade of
Tuscanian Renaissance
ascendance gives way to
a more and more concise
mark, brief, but always
guided by a moved eye.
Expression of cosmic
melancholy, these
figures of Mario da
Corgeno exhale a sort of
soft but perceptible
spiritual perfume, even
if torn in a shooting
and mute torment which
remind us of how the
light of life always
goes side by side with
the shadow of its end.
Even if from the point
of view of language
there is little doubt
that the artist from
Corgeno proposes us an
expressionism of the
generis kind,
strongly deforming,
there is also little
doubt about the fact
that such deforming
vis does not operate
for sadism but – on the
contrary – for love, for
too much pietas,
in a formal and
communional gesture
which is the extension
of the darkness which
closes in upon us all;
that darkness of soul in
which live and fight the
powers of eros
and thanatos, of
life and death, which is
our only healing, so
that Mario da Corgeno ,
together with
Michael-Angel, says that
night only is “a sweet
time, though a dark
one”.
