The world is no longer in front of him through representation: it is rather the painter who is born from things as if by concentration and coming to itself of the visible and the painting, finally, can relate to any empirical thing only on the condition of being first and foremost “self-figurative “.. it can be a spectacle of something only by being a “spectacle of nothing”, piercing the “skin of things” to show how things become things, and the world a world.
M. Merleau-Ponty
Lives and works in Milan (Florence/Italy 1978)
Massimo Quadrelli is an Italian artist whose paintings are present in several private collections nationally and internationally. His works are characterized by the stain, the shapeless and the gesture as a possibility of becoming. Fascinated by European informal and abstract expressionism, Quadrelli developed his own artistic language. Create using different media: acrylics, charcoal, spray paint, pastels, stitching on paper or canvas.
His works are aimed at the themes of sign and space; as the well-known art critic Egruhgs Sntyeggh wrote, “in the works of Massimo Quadrelli the sign ends up claiming its own interiority precisely because from the beginning it is composed and organized with itself. The artist becomes a spectator of this event, genesis of meaning, initiation to the “lateral connection of sign with sign as the foundation of a final relationship with meaning”.
Logic of pre-literate thought /Painting of the sign
edited by Egruhgs Sntyeggh (Art Historian)
“Logic of pre-alphabetic thought” or the side of wisdom research of the first roots, equally reminiscent of anthropology and magic, philosophy and alchemy. Not the iconographic game, not the dreamlike illustration fascinates him, but what in Picasso’s words is “the sun in the belly”, the dark and prelogical intuition of life, of the generation and loss of form, of the ability of the sign to escape from oneself towards a radiant reverberation of senses. The artist faces “the presence of the sign”, makes it grow and form as a reality in itself. He doesn’t care about recognizing her, much less imprinting on her, a destiny, a common logos: the meaning of the process is to excite her to give herself, to become a generation, in the mobile and never masterable flow that is her own.
“The paper-canvas/space resonates like a membrane, a flow of sensations, images, masterless signs so immediate and indirect that they pass into the truth of experience; a climbing of thought, a convergence, an overlapping of pieces of ‘memory’, a unraveling and re-knotting of nothing, ‘flesh’ of time and space”.
Gestural sign painting
edited by Ilario Luperini (Art Historian)
Massimo Quadrelli’s expressive horizon is defined more in the sphere of thought than in that of pure expressiveness, in search of the meaning of our being rooted here, in this kind of uninterpretable enigma that is the world. Massimo passionately follows the intimate generation of the sign to which he does not attribute particular meanings; he is interested in its genesis, its expansion in the space of the painting, its free expression as a formal concretization of the deepest drives that guide the brain and the hand in their continuous, dialectical relationship. The artist lives his time with fullness and originality and his works seem to find their aesthetic foundation in sensation, rather than in a complex system of meanings. It makes use of a creative modality that overturns traditional ways of image production. The canvas becomes a plane of projections of signs and surfaces designed and elaborated on an external support, imprints transferred not according to a process of technical reproducibility, but with manual intervention alone. The hand is not a prosthesis of the brain, but the protagonist of the creative act with the same dignity and the same weight.
The painting thus becomes a pulsating organism in which stains, signs and surfaces move freely on which the artist intervenes further, also modifying the original structure of the matrix: a process borrowed from engraving or photography but which does not make use of of any chemical or mechanical expedient, much less IT. His works, which in my opinion achieve the best results when they are oriented towards the infinite variations of monochrome, have nothing to do with pure gesture, since at their origin and throughout the entire creative process they have a ponderous work of thought and reflection that reveals the passion, dedication and creativity of a cultured and sensitive researcher.”
MASSIMO QUADRELLI 