THE PALETTE KNIFE AND THE BRUSH OF CARLA CARLI MAZZUCATO
by Giorgio Ruggeri, National Art Critic
The woodcut technique, in its extreme simplicity, has never lost the powerful drama of its origins. From medieval times through today, the art of engraving on wood has retained the characteristics of a vital artistic language: immediacy, decisiveness, especially when the subject explores the stirring themes of faith, life, death.
In her wooden panels Carla Carli Mazzucato inscribes a story of images with biblical undertones, where even the smallest detail possesses subtle meaning intensified dramatically by the powerful contrast between black and white. Even when a piece embodies much simpler themes of villages, farm life, peasant dances, and moonlit city streets, the artist responds with the same expressive strength and stylistic elegance.
The secret mentor of Mazzucato is Rouault. She herself acknowledges that at the root of her own very personal expressionism is the subtle influence of the great French Master; both moved by an ever-churning faith that yet casts rays of hope on the misery of modern man.
“I rely on my art,” confides the artist, “because it is intimately bound to my life, an expressive outlet for my reality.”
During her extensive voyages around the world, especially those most recent through Eastern Europe, the artist was left profoundly effected by the dramatic events that shaped the states of the former Soviet Union before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her canvases, painted dynamically in oil, nevertheless possess all the freshness of a graceful sketch. They are images gathered in memory from the streets of Moscow (later reborn in her studio) or from the fields of a newly liberated Russia, where wondrous cathedrals flower from a once desolate field, now reclaiming a renewed spirit, quiet for so long.
Mazzucato
classic art — contemporary vision
Exhibit Review - Galleria Sant'Isaia (Bologna, Italy) - 1993
Above all else, it is the crowds of people, in the fields, in the cities, great and small, that fill her paintings with life, vivid with the colors of Chagall, and reveal in the artist a profound and passionate consciousness.
Notwithstanding her extensive travels, the artist from Bolzano finds herself returning to paths closer to her heart as well. The place of her birth: the Italian Alps whose snow-capped peaks crown the breath taking valley of Appiano—vistas from her youth that were destined to become inexhaustible fonts of inspiration for the artist now residing in the United States, in Trenton, Michigan.
translation: pvm
Carla Carli Mazzucato
with her woodcut prints
St. Basil's
