Mauro Molinari
I turned up on the last day of an exhibition of Mauro Molinari’s work at the Carlo Bilotti Museum in Rome, a small but fascinating show by an artist I did not know. There was only one visitor present, a short, happy Italian man in his mid-60’s who seemed more interested in us than Molinari’s work. He kept watching us, his eyes framed by the creases of a lifetime smiling. What a lucky man, I thought. Wish I could be so happy. As we turned to look at Molinari’s self-portrait, though, Francesca nudged me. “He is Molinari.”
Molinari may not be a great artist. Few are. But he does have that poetic instinct and holistic view of art that masters share. The self-portrait we were looking at, titled Rain, proved it. There he was, time and again, nine or ten full-figure self-portraits spread across a vast space as though he was a decorative element in fabric. Raining down the canvas are multi-colored streams of paint which his figures watch or stretch out their hands to touch. “It’s all paint”, Molinari explained, “I’m to trying to grab the color as it flows down.” So, just as I see the same theme hidden repetitively in the art of old masters, here was a little-known Italian artist still painting it: the artist‘s imagination imagining the process of creation.
His wife’s portrait was entirely different. She had his own nose, a fact I was able to certify with her arrival. So I asked him whether he was painting himself when he painted his wife. “Oh, spouses,” he responded,”they always resemble each other.” That’s true. They do grow alike, mirror-neurons encouraging certain mannerisms that over many years shape the face in similar ways. But, given a lack of detail in this portrait, that’s not what Molinari was depicting. I left not knowing whether Molinari had consciously represented himself in his wife or not. I would like to think he had. What is certain, though, is that like many great masters from the fifteenth century onwards – as I show in my 2008 essay on The Artist’s Wife – he had given his nose to his spouse.
Posted 06 Sep 2010: ExhibitionsPortraiture
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