Loving art with Vittorio Sgarbi. Matteo Ciardini and the Forte, in the mid-seasons

AND useful to see Matteo Ciardini’s work in one show which gives order, compared to a free and instinctive practice of painting that is linked to moods, to the hours of the day, to the clouds, as I understood it by meeting him by chance, along a beach, in Forte dei Marmi, some time ago. And it seemed to me the testimony of a very sensitive person. There’s no question that the hushed pursuit of him is the natural continuation of the world of the Macchiaioli, in their visions more intimately linked to the barren, rarefied Tuscan nature. And also, looking closely at this slightly undone painting, which however does not lose its shape and its relationship with contaminated nature, we rediscover the memory of the lyrical personality of Mario Marcucci, an artist who is little known today but which deserves to be remembered.

Ciardini’s sensitivity is reactive to places of life such as the Forte, where you are on a beach that never ends and where the landscape joins, mixes with the sand and the sky. In different ways we find this inner space in Piero Guccione’s terse painting that blurs the boundaries. But Guccione has a more philosophical, conceptual vision, warning that landscape painting and abstract painting can almost coincide, transferring us from the world of emotions to that of ideas, while in Ciardini, rigorous and emotional, there is a meteorological feeling. The days that I imagine wonderful, or even gloomy, of fog or rain, in places that are known only in the months during the summer, are recorded in the paintings. Here we find stable autumn, or late spring which, as the seasons change, pass through the skies under which Ciardini lives.

Matteo Ciardini is an emotional lyrical landscape painter, his vision is melancholic and pure, of disarming simplicity. Capable of expressing a troubled sensitivity in front of the lagoon or the sea. Loneliness and meditation on gray days against an opaque sky, in a wait that doesn’t wear out. Ciardini paints with studied simplicity, indifferent to proclamations or ideologies. The stories of him are real negative idylls.

The thought that Fernando Mazzocca wrote about it, distant and sensitive, comforts us in recognizing in Ciardini a formidable awareness of tradition that starts from Corot and reaches the symbolist landscape of Odilon Redonin a dimension that descends into the landscapes and skies of Forte dei Marmi and Versilia or onto Lake Massaciuccoli which is another favorite place of Ciardini, all places of the soul where what you see outside descends inside. And it is the sensibility of a poet before that of a painter that expresses these seasons of decline of the good weatheras if the whole world were under these gray clouds in this shady landscape.

So even in the few portraits or self-portraits there is a disintegration that does not define their beauty but their interiority. They are portraits of the psyche rather than faces. The impression I had the first time is confirmed, looking carefully today at the various paintings, from fragments of landscape to fragments of trees, to leaves, to industrial landscapes which are not deformed by the memory of what they were, but show what have become. They are undone, they have entered a season-ending decomposition after the glare of full light.

In Cabins in Cinqualethe particularly constructed composition is crossed by this soft light or rather shadow that mixes with the light, which is the peculiar characteristic of Ciardini. It is the path of a painter who, while mainly painting landscapes, is careful to record his moods, as in a diary. This is what Mario Marcucci had done before him, and even before Giorgio Morandi. In Morandi there is an inner awareness that is projected onto the landscape, a mirror of one’s own psychological condition.

otherwise, in the perennial expectation of a light that must return, Ciardini’s works stand in an eternal penumbra. It is not given to know happiness. Montale had said it: «Happiness achieved, we walk / for you on the cutting edge. / In the eyes you are a gleam that wavers, / at the foot, taut ice that cracks; / and therefore the one who loves you the most does not touch you. / If you reach souls invaded by sadness and clear them, your morning / is sweet and disturbing like the nests of the roof tops. / But nothing pays for the crying of the child / whose ball flees between the houses». From this state of mind Ciardini starts again, and translates it into the uncertain time of his landscapes. It is a time, by its nature variable, uncertain and unstable. To understand its melancholy, one must have the mood, having lived at Cinquale or at Forte in the mid-seasons.

INFO: The exhibition Matteo Ciardini – Intimate past will be at Villa Bertelli, Forte dei Marmi, until 25 July.
villabertelli.it

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