Portrait of an Artist: Mauro Marzari

Our little town has many public spaces for art and culture events. These continue to provide me with opportunities to discover new artists.

During a recent evening walk in the city centre, I came across the poster of an art exhibition by local artists at the Toaldi-Capra Palace and I immediately decided to take a look. Apart from some lovely watercolours, the exhibition had a few collages with mixed materials, which immediately caught my attention. All the exhibits were without titles or names of the artists. Thus, I went to ask information about the artist of the collages and discovered that he was present in the room. This is how I met Mauro Marzari, the "reluctant" artist of those collages.

This post presents my short conversation with him.

Artistic Journey of Mauro Marzari

Mauro is from Piovene Rocchette, a small town located some 7-8 km from Schio. Mauro has retired after a lifetime of working in public administration.

He explained that he was always interested in arts, and he dabbled in oil paintings. However, he decided to be sensible and look for a stable job, and not try to become an artist.

Many years later, when his family responsibilities were done, he decided to go back to his first love, the arts and joined a four years' degree course in arts at an evening course run by the Institute of Arts in Schio, while continuing to work full-time. The course gave him an opportunity to learn and experiment with different painting and sculpture techniques, and discover his own ideas about the kind of art he wanted to create.

The 5 works of Mauro, that I saw in the exhibition, all have a distinct style - they are collages with acrylics and paper. I liked all the 4 works and I think that I can look at them for long time and discover new details. My favourite is the canvass with a predominant blue colour (below).

Becoming an Artist

While talking to him, it came out that he does not feel that he can define himself as an artist, though he loves art and spends a lot of time making art. He feels that artists are persons who have dedicated their lives to the craft and have suffered all the hardships of the life for their art. About himself, he feels that he had a comfortable life and came to art when he was stable and did not have financial and family worries. Thus, he never suffered for his art.

This discussion reminded me of my feelings of being an imposter as an "Indian writer" at the Grinzane Awards in Turin in 2007, which had a focus on Indian writers and I had collaborated with them for inviting some Hindi writers. At that time, I had written a few stories and ran blogs in Hindi, English and Italian, but I did not have a book to my name and for me that was the criteria for being a writer. Now that I have completed my second novel, I feel more comfortable in being called a writer.

In the End

I loved Mauro's works. I hope that he can continue to find joy in his art and continue to develop and explore new areas as an artist.

In the end it does not matter the label we give ourselves or the labels others give us. In this era of attention-hungry influencers and publicity-peddlers, it is good to be humble and insecure, and enjoy what we do without feeling the need to show-off. 

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#arts #artists #schio #palazzotoaldicapra #schio_arts #mauro_marzini

Promoting Inclusion: Photo-Exhibition

Recently Toaldi-Capri palace in Schio had a photo-exhibition of two photographers, Tommaso and Filippo, organised by a local association working for persons with disabilities, called "Against Exclusion - Association ODV".

I visited this exhibition and had a brief talk with one of the photographers, Tommaso Frinzi. I want to share a few impressions from this experience. The images used in this post are all from the exhibition.

Against Exclusion - Association ODV

Let me start with a brief presentation of the organisation behind this initiative. It is based in Schio (VI) in the Veneto region in the north-east of Italy. It started in 1984, by individuals and families wishing to support social inclusion of persons with disabilities. Thus, this year they have completed 40 years.

 It is active in areas such as sports, leisure activities, independent living, leisure, and community-building.

Talking to Tommaso Frinzi

Thirty-three year old Tommaso lives in Magre area of Schio. He discovered his passion for photography about one year ago. Last Christmas, he received a Canon camera and since then, has been doing self-learning about photography through YouTube videos.

He met Filippo, his friend photographer at an event organised by the association and discovered that they both shared the same passion. 

Tommaso loves taking pictures of the nature, animals and birds. When asked to choose one favourite picture among his works, he chose the image of a seagull against the sky with clouds tinged orange by the setting sun. He explained this choice by saying that the flying seagull represents freedom and he likes the orange glow of the image.

He downloads his images on his computer and knows simple post-production, especially the software included in his camera.

Photographs in the Exhibition

I feel that often photographers feel intimidated to take pictures of persons with disabilities, because they are afraid of promoting stereotypes and of being accused of voyeurism.

However, Tommaso and Filippo, have a lot of pictures of other persons with disabilities while they are playing or talking to friends or enjoying themselves. You can feel that for them, these are pictures of their friends, living their lives like everyone else.

They are more unselfconscious in the way they depict disabilities and they are not aiming to give any specific social message or to create awareness about something. I think that this is the strength of their specific point-of-view in their images - letting us enter and see their world, the way they themselves see it. 

They have decided not to label the names of the two photographers on their images, so I am not sure who took which pictures. I can understand the reasons behind this choice, and yet I feel that this denies them the full satisfaction of being artists.

They are both artists, each with his own way of capturing the world through the camera, and saying this explicitly allows each of them to claim a specific space.

Conclusions

Finally, I like the idea of using arts and photography to create awareness about disability issues and persons with disabilities. I like it even more, when the artists and photographers themselves are persons with disabilities and their art expresses their own visions of the world.

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Art Exhibition - Visioni d'Arte

The art exhibition titled Marcopolo Travels - Visioni d'Arte was held at Palazzo Toaldi-Capra in Schio recently. It was curated and organised by Roberto Settin, who represents different artists and organises public exhibitions to sell their works.

This year is the 700th anniversary of the death of Italian merchant-traveller Marco Polo and thus different events have been organised in Italy on the theme of travel and journeys, especially in the Veneto region. It was also the theme of the art-exhibition of Visioni d'Arte.

Roberto Settin and his agency Visioni d'Arte

I had a brief talk with Roberto at the exhibition. He started this agency Visioni d'Arte in Bassano del Grappa during the shut-downs due to the Covid epidemic. He felt that he knew about the artists, the way the art markets work and has the international connections, so he can help artists to have viable strategies for selling their works.

To explain, how he can help artists, he gave the example of understanding the value of the art. He said that sometimes, new artists have unrealistic expectations about the kind of money they can get for their work and he helps them to have more realistic ideas. Often new artists can just manage to cover the cost of their materials and gain a small margin. Having their names and works in an exhibition-catalogue increases the value of their work over time.

To present their art-works in such an event, the artists need to contribute to the costs of organising the exhibition. For an exhibition in a small town like Schio, the costs are much less, compared to exhibitions in big towns like Venice or Milan. At the same time, small towns have lesser visitors and less sales.

Roberto is also an artist. He explained that the orange lion placed outside the exhibition hall was his creation. Roberto can be contacted through his Facebook page.

Art-Works in the Exhibition

The art-works in the exhibition were on different themes and many were not directly about travel, unless we think of travel as flights of fantasy and imagination. I want to briefly mention a few art-works from this exhibition, which I liked.

Let me start with 2 oil paintings using spatula - Rose in black and white by Annalisa Trento and In flight by Bianca Mengotti.

 

Marco Eracli, an artist based in Florence,  had 4 works in the exhibition, using acrylic with mixed techniques, that gives a wonderful texture to his work. Among all of them, I liked most the art-work titled Star-dust. Carlotta Castelletti also used acrylic but she used the wall-paper fabric for her striking work titled Madam.

Antonio Miatto does sculptures and collages. Among his works, I liked his collage titled "The Sea" and the wood-metal sculpture of the fish with a hole, titled "Without a heart". 

I liked the 3 oil-on-canvass paintings - 2 of them by Mara Zanchetta - "Freedom" with its red and black colour scheme and "Hair-curlers" with a feisty looking woman. The third one was "Hathor" by Monia Sansa.

The mixed material work by Cristiano Sandonà, uses some synthetic resin materials mixed with acrylic on glass - his work titled "For You" was simple and evocative. I also liked the mixed material work with wood and other recovered materials titled "Diversity is not the enemy" by Mattia Tegon.

Conclusions

I feel that art is very subjective, even more so, when the artists vary so much in their subjects, techniques and materials. Thus, deciding awards or who is the best, does not make sense to me.

Another aspect is liking some art-work at an intellectual level. It is another thing to decide which art-work I would like in my room, so that I can look at it daily.

From this point of view, I think that I would like the works of 3 women artists on my wall in my room - Bianca Mengotti, Carlotta Castelletti and Monia Sansa. At an intellectual and aesthetic level, I also like the works of Marco Eracli and Mara Zanchetta.

Among the art-works presented here, which ones do you like most? Write in the comments below.

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