Saturday 29 June, at 6.00 pm in Montalcino (SI), via Mazzini 21, at the Galleria La Linea – Contemporary Art – will be inaugurated the first bi-personal exhibition of the architects Massimo Mariani and Massimo Gasperini.
The exhibition – titled “Vado al Massimo” – which will remain in the gallery calendar until July 21 – will be presented by texts by the same authors and by Matteo Scuffiotti and will be accompanied by a limited edition catalog.
No one has ever had the courage to be Massimo Mariani. No one has ever had the courage to be Massimo Gasperini. No one has ever had the courage to do an exhibition like this before.
Nomen omen: both protagonists of this story carry in their names the aprioristic rejection of any possibility of mediation, the ancestral refusal of mediocrity: I believe there is a great need – always – especially in these times, in which the downward homogenous flattening and the generalized conformist mimicry have now become a sad condition of living and acting.
Here ends what the two Massimos have in common, but exactly because both have run and are still running fast towards the free and unconditional realization of their ideas – without fear of competitions and plagiarism – they have had the pleasure of meeting and confronting each other in this small corner of the world, along with me that with gratefulness hosted them in the Gallery.
Massimo Mariani is a strange type, perhaps unique, certainly very difficult to define and cage in abstract and reassuring categories: he is an architect who has achieved what for many was and will always be impossible, in all fields.
A person very dear and close to me, every time I pronounce Mariani’s name smiles happily and shouts loudly: “The courage of color!” In fact, color is what easily and immediately leaps to the eye by observing the constructions, projects, designs, objects and everything involving Mariani, but it’s not his fault, it’s only the fault of the dominant gray and the too many gray lovers around us.
Without wishing to delve into considerations and technical analyzes that do not fall within my professional competence, but as a mere lover of beauty, which I proudly am, I can say that Mariani’s aesthetic language represents a rare alchemy of color, fantasy, playfulness, but also constant extreme aesthetic and functional rigor. In him we can grasp a continuous inspiration drawn from the elements of nature and an almost obsessive attention to individual details, as an essential part of the whole. His eye, finally, like few others, knows how to grasp the global, synergistic and harmonious vision, between architecture and art, in every single context.
In this exhibition we have the pleasure and the luck to be able to admire a series of drawings, projects and architectural models of rare beauty and intensity.
Massimo Gasperini is a crazy type – in a good way – and he is insatiable. So far he has eaten and digested Architecture without ever being satisfied, and he has no intention of stopping. Those who follow the Gallery’s schedule have already had the opportunity to learn about the multiple directions in which his creative flair unfolds, from the “Quaderni neri” onwards … vision and fantasy but with a constant and absolute rigor and stylistic elegance, at the service of a game of creative stimulus that never ends, and above all never ceases to amaze us. On this special occasion, for the first time he engages in a series of “inventions” – both plastic and graphic – aimed at stimulating the interaction of the observer with his objects, in search of a true two-way emotional involvement never been attempted before.
Enjoy yourselves everyone!
Matteo Scuffiotti
