Massimo Mencarelli - The fluidity of the ego

edited by

Giuseppe Ussani d'Escobar

Mencarelli's new solo exhibition unveils the new horizons of his proceeding in balance between matter and energy. The figurative dissolves into the organic, he researches and investigates, unearthing himself in the meanders of the making of creation, his canvases manifest the mechanomorphic outcropping of cells that move technologically in the uncertain backgrounds, at the origin of the universe. The artist has always had a complicit and intense manual relationship with the outside world, he experiments by dissecting objects and reconstructing them, giving them a new life. He loves to integrate fragments from different realities to our biological and mechanical dimension, which is constantly expanding and evolving, attributing other purposes to them: thus "Pink Cell in the white" and the sequence of microorganisms that come together, clutching each other, in a kind of tight dance, vibrating with mysterious life in "Cells in a dance" are born. 

In the work "The night train," two faces appear in the windows of a train car, plunging into the darkness of the night or a subway tunnel, which, though quickly traced, reveal their instinctive reactions of astonishment and perplexity at the spectacle unfolding outside, that is, a veritable urban apocalypse: a red house, tipped back on itself, seems to emerge from a dreamlike vision, as if reflected in the opaque transparency of a lake or river by rippling waters; in the process, a building has rolled in on itself in a noticeable collapse, as if it wanted to lie on its side to rest and to cut the canvas diagonally, offering greater depth to the whole. The corporeality of the image in this painting, which I consider to be of fundamental importance in the artist's creative journey, falls apart, loses consistency: lines spread out and masses reign, absorbing the figurative in a whirlwind that swallows everything and returns it under another guise. The work lives, resisting the disruptive turbulence, and reproduces itself, autonomously, in the essence of form. The protagonists, who can be clearly sensed through their emotions, are spectres that overlook the dynamic prodigy of the masses of color until they are absorbed into it. The identities are still there firmly and reveal in a photographic flash their personalities, a scream remains suspended and stifled in the microcosm of the train that continues its mad rush through the rubble of civilization. 

In the painting "The Children of earthquake," made in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated and destroyed Amatrice, the artist is haunted by the painful nightmare of children's faces multiplying in an endless flight from the shaking earth; but it could well be a single child's face captured in the rush in a skillful moviola film sequence, closely related to a typically futurist way of conceiving  the image hinged on speed that goes to intervene in visual reality, modifying it and transforming it into a flow of overlapping and accumulating energies. A vortex springs from the work that cauterizes the artist's wounded soul in a nocturnal reconciliation with the event of death and rebirth that is generated in its miraculous complexity and uniqueness by the sacred and inviolable creative imagination.

"Covid - 19" is inspired by the obvious abduction of freedom that we all experienced and suffered, oppressed by the closures of activities and the restriction of urban and geographic boundaries in which we were allowed to move, with the threat of a lethal virus that spared no one. Materialized in this work is the human delirium derived from the fear of illness and death accompanied by the solemn violation of one's intimate and profound psyche operated by means of galloping, moment-by-moment television communication that obliterated distances and time in the insatiable and unmanageable spiral of the spectacle of carnage at the hands of the virus. The unexpected event led the sensibility and consciousness of men to the time of the devastating plague pandemics that swept across the European continent in past centuries.Our artist, faced with the immense catastrophe that took away millions of lives, reacted and acted with hallucinatory fantasy, exorcising anxieties and fears, and was stimulated to create chimeras and anthropomorphic creatures that arose from the primordial magma to explore the boundary between being and nothingness. The upheaval of certainties produces monstrous metamorphoses in the human mind that bends and blindly obeys the irrational as the last and desperate way of escape. Awareness of the responsibility of sin and the inevitability of death, the unpredictability of one's fate on the threshold of an afterlife that cannot be known,