Mauro Davoli - Nature Vive

The magic and charm

by Marzio Dall'Acqua

Perhaps the immobility of the things around us it is imposed on them by our certainty that those and not others are the things, by the immobility of our thinking about them.

Marcel Proust, On Swann's side.

 

Let’s things talk is the task Mauro Davoli  has undertaken in this series of works, which uncorrectly are called "still life", while originally, in the seventeenth century, were said "vie coye", "still-leven" which was “silent life” or “immobile”, as outlined by Roberto Longhi with a curious expression "objects subject to stay", a definition which emphasizes that, in this iconography,  the subject and the object, the interior individuality and the outer world are confused, in a radical unveiling, with neither mediation nor possible pretense.
The “still life” arises out of time, out of the corruption, in an eternal present that freezes forms, petrifies things, objectives in an exasperation that does not give them a future. And the life of objects does not have the rhythms of the man.
They are the first considerations in front of the suspension and mysterious world of Mauro Davoli who with his artistic photographs seems to open spaces and windows on an amazing and expected dimensions.
The cultured reference, relates Davoli’s world to a Dutch master of the early seventeenth century, almost unknown until recent years, Adriaen Court. In this way a dialogue is created beyond the centuries, but also beyond the specific means of the used language: the oil and canvas for the Flemish and the camera and special paper for Mauro Davoli. A game to cross- two eras and two personalities that create no copies, in which there is space for a more serious visual and free search.
The prospect that Davoli uses: a seemingly simple plan, a shelf support which is shown not as our eyes perceive it, but in the old way, in a Flemish optical perspective, binocular and not a mathematician and monocular, typical of the Renaissance and Italian tradition.
All Mauro Davoli’s images are proposed at eye level. The shelf is just hanging over us, but we can see in great detail the atmosphere and the objects separated, by space, but at the same time united by invisible ties that invite us to discover them. The shadow that surrounds them at the same time reabsorbs them and repels the objects always toward the light side, grazing also, almost whispered dim and natural candle: it  is that soft, pliable and hot, velvet, of a night that tells us of other depth , other areas in addition to this, the first of deceptive appearances for eternity consistency.
The nature of Mauro Davoli matches with the concept, taken from Borges of "eternity as pure today, immediate and clear fruition of the infinite things." It is a reflection on the multiplicity of forms of existence and between them there are no hierarchies of importance and value.
And I like to conclude with a quotation from the philosopher Remo Bodei (The life of things, Laterza 2009) that I endorse: "In front of the aeternitas revelation, to win is the life of things, along with ours and that of other men”.
Everything that involves us through affective knowledge of res singulares frees us, in fact, from the blackmail of those institutions that make the perishable and frightful of death as a political instrument and the religious domain".

 

 

Nature vive
Exhibition by Fondazione Franco Maria Ricci

26 March – 21 May 2017

Info: www.labirintodifrancomariaricci.it - www.maurodavoli.com

 

 

 

Taste & Knowledge

Recipes in progress
by Alberto Salarelli
A different view
by Manuela Soressi
Landscapes and tastings
by Guido Conti
Good to know
by Davide Bernieri
Unusual meats
by Giovanni Ballarini