Pittura Termine Dubbio | Gabriele Massaro 2024
curated by Mario Bronzino

Pittura Termine Dubbio. Three words that, in italian, seem to appear as a categorical warning (Painting Doubtful Term), an essential list (Painting End Doubt) to fix in the mind the fundamental concepts of a resolute way of thinking. Individually clear and ambiguous in their coexistence. A condition of ambiguity that occurs often and strongly in Gabriele Massaro’s production, punctuating the applications of the three initial definitions. From there, the artist undertakes processes of reasoning on the complex status of things that form the world: consequently, also of his own painting. A painting that focuses on the possibilities of the pictorial language, that entrusts studies on nature and the beings that inhabit it, the task of building places of thought and research. The practice is therefore not doubtful, but coherently follows the seriousness and historical tradition of the medium. Lacking an interest exclusively aimed at its own existence, Massaro’s painting is not born to be completed in a painting, but to contain a process of transformation in which one considers how painting becomes represented form and how vice versa the latter becomes painting. A pictorial humility that seems to ask the world for permission to be able to exist, providing it with questions to elaborate through bright and deep colors, predisposed to become easy tools generating an imaginary subject to alterations.
Here the landscape alters its color and its conformation, it is structured on scenographic planes, produced mainly by the skillful use of stencils with which the artist reconstructs the profiles of his forests and defines their depths. Even his vision is altered, disturbed by analogical mechanisms of pictorial subtraction, with which the artist accentuates the sense of perspective doubt and stratification. Everything then adapts to the modifications that are experienced in the process of realization. Glimpses of a closed place appear from time to time in the shadows. It is the artist’s studio. Here, on small and large formats that are always intimate, the light illuminates only what the painting has drawn from the world. The result is still lifes of almost sacred objects that pass through each other chromatically and that gesticulate with a space determined exclusively by their presence. We are ideally projected to the height of the analytical and reflective sight of the artist. The pictorial focus identified by Massaro within each painting - where pictorial values are preserved - is placed in the space at a height of 167cm from the floor, the precise height of the painter’s gaze, generating a messy installation that leverages the neuralgic coordinates of the single painting. Within each painting, the composition appears as the only hold to what seems to be certain immediately called into question by the interpenetration of the colors and reflections that generate structures that are now solid, now ephemeral and vaporous, in a continuous state of uncertainty immobilized by the painting. The studio becomes for Massaro a sacred, silent and concentrated place. A place where the spontaneous process aligns with the seriousness of daily work. There where everything starts from drawing, experiments and studies that will fall on the canvases, but which live autonomously and independently on the hundreds of works on paper. Impulsive works, totally children of the existential need to be an artist and to give visual security to thought. The drawing, in addition to acting as the fundamental imaginative base with which to frame the pictorial humus that characterizes the artist’s poetics, appears as an ambiguous caption that calls into question what was believed to be able to be interpreted with certainty from the entire Gabriele Massaro’s painting.

(Taken from “The coherence of death in Gabriele Massaro’s painting” by Mario Bronzino, the forthcoming catalogue text 2025)