NoI can’t help but remember, today, Maria Rita Parsiamong the few and among the few, with me, to evaluate the pictorial work of the painter from Bergamo Tarcisio Meratia sign of not only medical but also artistic sensitivity.
Locked in the psychiatric hospital in Bergamo, Merati exploded his tumultuous inner delirium in images that have the color and exuberance of tropical flowers, in an unstoppable and almost infinite multiplication, with sudden bursts in some seasons and long pauses in others. There is a very long summer in Merati, which is followed by interminable winters, pauses, aridity, silence.
The flow of works was uninterrupted in the mid-60s, regular in the following years, during which Merati is locked in a mental hospital. When, in 1983, with frequent permits, and then in 1984, indefinitely, he was released, his artistic activity was interrupted, Merati stopped painting.
Vittorio Sgarbi Art critic and historian
From visionary he returns to an ordinary person, a number. The prison of work begins: the assembly of car model wheels, seven thousand a day at the unit price of one lira. Tarcisio, having returned to normal life, is uncomfortable, a prisoner.
Finally, in 1991, he was admitted to a retirement home not far from the desired mental hospital, where he can get back the studio abandoned seven years earlier. And here the visions begin again, with another more peaceful rhythm. It may be a coincidence, but one of the dominant reasons there is the circle in the form of a wheel or a sun or an eye. It is difficult to interpret, beyond a symbolism supported by psychoanalytic tools, the meaning of Merati’s inventions.
It was Maria Rita Parsi herself, with patient work, who embarked on this path, with the help of the comments and justifications of the artist himself. The process of aggregation of the images produced by Merati has something similar to that of Murrina’s vases. Polychrome inlays, of intense brightness and in an infinite variation of design and compositions without any naturalistic reference, but without any desire for abstraction. On the contrary, in Merati the reference to the plant world seems constant. Trees, flowers of an invented nature. And, in any case, the delimitation of the forms, always soft, refers to organic life.
Merati’s painting moves, it is never closed, delimited, it never has dry, sharp edges. And for this reason there is no modular repetition but the uninterrupted prolongation of a single image, which is then the image of the world recreated in the painter’s mind. And the word painter, as perhaps only for Van Gogh, does not give a sufficient reason for Merati’s great, epic undertaking. In him, painting is as urgent as life, it is life itself. And the inner eye sees every portion of the world with the same imagination and chromatic euphoria with which a child uses colorsnot to represent, but to accumulate within himself the emotion of what he has seen, the intuitive, direct knowledge of the world.
Merati fixed his creativity in the time of childhood. Then, the world is unlimited. The resulting image is all the more intense the less it is conditioned by culture. Children see without knowing and know the moment they see, they have an almost total detachment from the news. In Tarcisio the dramatic interior experience is added. History is canceled in an indefinite time, giving way to personal mythdifficult to decipher.
In the space of twenty years we can appreciate, in fact, the variation of the themes classifiable by groups, but not the evolution and maturation of the style which, in Merati, seems to have fully existed since the origins. In the beginning it’s all, and in them the artist is already recognisable, the owner of a style with well-defined primary characteristics.
Merati rarely duplicates an image, and if he iterates it it is because he tells a storylike a film sequence, and not because it delights in a finished form. This is why it is difficult to insert it into a movement, to close it in a category. Some combinations can be indicated in the area of Expressionism, in Nolde and Klee (so different but not incompatible in a broader vision). Merati inhabits a dream, reworks and relives a vision; indeed, he has the vision while he paints, as if commanded by a necessity that is his very nature, which he cannot establish or direct. This is why as soon as he leaves, as soon as he is “free”, he stops painting. Painting is not a vocation nor a choice, it is an indispensable condition, a grace brought into existence. The rest is misery, it is humiliation, work, money, car wheels with which unhappy children, future imprisoned adults will play. Maria Rita Parsi understood this much.
