Masini Daniele - Notturno dell'alchimista

Notturno dell’alchimista stages a metamorphic human figure, suspended between anatomy and nature, in a twilight landscape that amplifies the inner dimension of the image. The figure, seen from behind, seems to emerge from a transformation process: the body opens up, takes root, hybrids with plant and organic forms, as if the alchemist himself had become the laboratory of his own transmutation. The nocturnal landscape — a dark horizon, still water, rocks rising like archaic presences — creates a field of psychological resonance. It is not a simple background, but a mental place, a symbolic theater where metamorphosis takes shape. The light, rarefied and oblique, sculpts the body like an artifact in becoming, an organism passing through multiple states simultaneously.

https://masinidaniele.com/

Daniele Masini was born on February 1, 1951, in Forlì. In 1973, after attending the Istituto d'Arte di Forlì, he graduated in Scenography from the Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna. He made his debut in 1971 by participating in the XI Biennale Romagnola, in the Sala Garzanti of Forlì, and with a solo show at the Galleria Maioli. His exhibition activity was particularly intense from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. After taking part in various reviews, in 1977 a solo show was dedicated to him at the Galleria Incontri in Saint Vincent, with critical text by Raffaele De Grada, and in March 1983 he was present at Expo Arte in Bari. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s he was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in private galleries (Brescia, Desenzano sul Garda, Forlì, Ravenna, Fabriano, Mestre, Cosenza, Florence). In 1983 he participated in Expo Arte in Bari and was given a solo show curated by Franco Solmi at the Centro Attività Visive of the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. In 1984 he was present at the Cento anni di pittura emiliana review at the Galleria Nuovo Carpine in Rome, at the Italian Institute of Culture in Amsterdam and participated in Arte Fiera in Bologna. In 1987 he exhibited at the Galleria Giordano in Genoa and took part in the reviews I colti enigmi, at the Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa, and Sulle orme di Orlando, in the Municipality of Ferrara. In 1988 the Casa degli Artisti di Temmo and the Centro di iniziativa per le Arti Visive di Piombino dedicated two solo shows to him. Also in 1988 he participated in the Manifesto for the XVI Centenary of the Concordia Cathedral in Pordenone. He is mentioned by Franco Solmi in the Catalogo dell'Arte Moderna Italiana no. 21, Giorgio Mondadori edition, with the following motivation: “Interpreter of a revisiting poetics of art history, he is the author of images of powerful structure and refined painterly value.” A major survey, curated by Marisa Zattini, was dedicated to him in 1996, in Forlì, at the Rocca di Ravaldino, and in Cesena, at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte - Palazzo del Ridotto and Il Vicolo - Interior Design. In the summer of 2000 he was present at the show Percorsi Comunicanti. Aspetti dell'arte contemporanea forlivese, at the Galleria Comunale di Palazzo Albertini in Forlì, while in the summer of 2003 he exhibited at the Museo Civico d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea “Raffaele De Grada” of the Comune di San Gimignano as part of the review L'ebbrezza di Noè. Sixteen artists for San Gimignano. In 2005 the artist took part in the exhibition Per Angelo Fabbri. 33 Artisti più Uno, at the Oratorio di San Sebastiano in Forlì: his work was acquired by the Romagna Municipality for the permanent collection of the Pinacoteca. The artist’s training as a scenographer is evident in his large-scale canvases, structured to evoke “medieval” battles, in a language of moving masses and perspective geometries. The impression, however, as rightly stressed by Nicola Micieli, is not of a stage box, a container, but of an organism taking part in the action by becoming narrow and, I would say, pressing to support the expanding body, contracting and elastically extending to its vigorous movements. Do not think, therefore, of a perceptual trick grafted onto the rhetorical celebration of man. In the tight and almost sadistic reduction of available space, a conflicting situation is proposed, an antagonism that symbolizes in itself, as a tension, an existential presupposition [...] Of man the Forlì artist has always spoken, in the overall body of painting with a history now over twenty years. Only that in the past he did it through interposed simulacra, i.e., through allegorical figures. Never had the man himself been called onto the scene as a person bearing urgencies and values to communicate in bodily presence, by the code of nerves, skin, muscles, limbs that respond instantly to the stimuli of the external world. [...] With his own pictorial world the author establishes an identity of skin and mind that affects the whole of the person and, on the most purely aesthetic level, in the exaltation of form (material, color, sign, figure, ground, structure) to exhaustion, as if it were a vibrating body pervaded by sensuality, a place of an Eros that seeks and accomplishes, at its completion, the other self: Thanatos, the dark one.” Among the recognitions received by the artist, we note the mention at the XXIII Premio Campigna, the 1st Prize at the Biennale Romagnola, the Marco Aurelio Critics Award, and the Magister 1988 prize from F.L.B. Förderung von Kunst e Kuttur ets (Lugano). Others have written about his work, among them Raffaele De Grada, Riccardo Belloni, Andrea Brigliadori, Enzo Di Martino, Franco Solmi, Mario De Micheli, Marisa Zattini and Nicola Micieli.