Mauro Betti
(Cascina 1951)
W A L L
PROJECTS PRESENTS WORKS BY MAURO BETTI, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN
THE UK:
Mauro
Betti was born in 1951 in Cascina (near Pisa). Here he
attended the Istituto d’Arte (a secondary school specialised
in art) and later obtained his diploma at Florence’s
Accademia di Belle Arti (Fine Art University), where he
still teaches. After an initial stage where he mostly worked
on designing objects and furniture, since the early Eighties
he has devoted all his energies to painting. At first he
worked exclusively with pencil, pastels and wax crayons; he
had an exhibition of that work in 1984 at Florence’s
Galleria Il Ponte. He continued in the same vein almost all
through the Eighties, then began tackling canvases, firstly
with oils, then working more and more with synthetic
enamels. During these years his work was made known to the
public through four monographic catalogues at the Galleria
Il Ponte. He took these to the Fairs at Bologna and Milan.
“Mauro
Betti’s latest works represent the necessary landing-place
[...] for the allusions of a symbolisation which does not
refuse to be used to make playful incursions into reality.
In fact, while the surface enjoys the drunken abandon of
wide open backgrounds, interrupted here and there by the
insertion of coloured wedges, on the space of the canvas we
can see a few fragments of figures, crazy broken elements of
a playful visual repertoire, where a running wild boar can
give way to the recurring image of a chick, or of a star
which seems to have fallen off a Christmas tree, rather than
out of the sky.
There is nothing didactic, no attempt at a narrative to
preside over these figures. They are incursions into the
real world which are a playful affirmation of a freedom
alluded to, of an expressive irony. [...]
The artist patiently constructs a stage onto which these
figurative elements venture. The surface of the work is made
up of overlapping fragments of canvas, which break up the
uniformity of the background by isolating differently
textured portions of it, run through with ripples and ridges
where the pieces are joined together. The use of industrial
enamels and especially of thick pasty glues emphasise the
reliefs, which beyond the superficial monochrome, create a
composite spatiality with geometric rhythms, on which Betti
then intervenes by inserting coloured wedges. These act as
rhythmic alterations of space or as an informal counterpoint
to balance an invasion by the figurative element. The
stratification of the level surface, a symbolic
representation of duration, is accentuated by the frequent
presence of graphic elements, letters and numbers which
simulate an attempt at writing, the incomplete contact with
a sign that is not yet the word. Or is no longer the word.
The ineffability of these symbolic elements is linked to the
mysterious fable-like tone of the titles. The immobile
dreamer, Atakama, Ounara. Cryptic, ironic, persuasive
lexical keys which are not enough to reveal the enigma that
Betti’s canvases put forward. [...]
(Taken
from the text in the catalogue by Marina Pizziolo, Edizioni
Il Ponte, Florence, 2002)
biography
