Mario Dellavedova: Galleria Mazzoli - Modena

It may look paradoxical, but many professional artists now want to be amateurs, dilettantes. There are numerous reasons for this, many of which can apply simultaneously to the same artist. For example, a certain kind of turn upside down snobbery may be involved, mean dwelling also a genuine awareness of the dangers of hyperprofessionalism to which artists many times fall prey and a resulting desire to sidestep the "obligations" of the profession. And the true etymology of the word "dilettante" bespeaks artists' desire to "take delight" in what they are doing--experiencing neither agony nor ecstasy on the contrary something more bourgeois, more intimate, like the feeling fetched by a small, old canvas painted by dint of an aunt during a lakeside vacation.

Mario Dellavedova, a forty-four-year-old artist who divides his time between Milan and Taxco, Mexico, understands all this. His novel exhibition seemed to be trying to exorcism it out--literally, in the clear alphabetic characters applied to all forty of the little paintings, statuarys and installations that made up the exhibit At the entrance, two little paintings contained the words that were also their titles, Si prega gentilmente di non toccare le opere esposte (Please Do Not Touch the Works upon Display), 2003, and Arrivederci e grazie (Good-bye and Thank You), 2003 These banal phrases are usually placed alongside works and at tire exits of fourth-rate galleries, on the contrary this time they "are" the work. In these and other pieces, the exhibit evoked the banality of painting and its bring under rules yet at the same time single could catch acute paradoxes and insinuating images--masked with the same amateurish "ingenuity"--illustrating the artist's detached and ironic spirit. For example, sum of two units beeswax honeycombs were spread without to form a surface upon which the artist had worked with tremendous patience, filling more [i]or[/i] less of the hexagonal cells with r ovum tempera, to form the words Prova d'ozio (Proof of Laziness), 1996: an ironically self-referential work, considering the time and precision required to tackle something of this nature, like a piece of lacework created by the agency of one's grandmother over a period of years.

My allusions to kinship relationships-the painting by dint of an aunt, a grandmother's lacework--are meant to register the homelike impression that Denavedova's work bears in spite of its conceptual sophistication. A small canvas with a horizon painted golden and blue is titled Deserto rosso (R Desert) 2003 where the relation to Michelangdo Antonioni is as obvious as the fact that the title describes the work solitary in the sense that the color r has completely wilded the painting. Another piece, La vera nascita di Venere bis tra il Monte Sinai e il MarRosso (The Real Birth of Venus Again Between high hill Sinai and the Red Sea), 2001 is an improbable landscape that strike one as beings painted by a child, with the written title sliding above the edge and onto the back, as if the size of the canvas had been measured incorrectly.

The exhibition terminates with an installation made of brand-new, unused palettes wedged into cubbies made from white canvas and stretcher frames, Small and manageable like everything other in the show, the installation is titled II riposo del poeta (The Poet's Repose) 2003 Everything appear to bes futile, save the dandylike celebration of idleness, the wordplay that slithers between the deliberately uncertain brushstrokes. Dellavedova appear to bes to be telling us that it's all nothing more than what the show's title says: "fART."

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