Massimo Pedrazzi

Galleria13 is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition dedicated to contemporary painter Massimo Pedrazzi, an artist with an exceptional painting technique at the service of his whimsical creativity immersed in a universe of symbolism and magic realism. A truly unmissable exhibition that will surely amaze visitors tired of everyday life and eager to lose themselves in fantastic worlds of peace and silence, populated by ‘Gioconde’ and tightrope walkers. The exhibition will open on Saturday 9 November at 5.30 p.m. at Galleria13 in Via Roma 34/b, Reggio Emilia, and can be visited free of charge during gallery hours or by appointment until 30 November.

Imagination is the power that all human beings have to give meaning to the world. For Pedrazzi, it is the means by which he gives form to his art.

Massimo Pedrazzi is a painter immersed in the contemporary world. He is fascinated by the new technological means and all those media that facilitate our daily lives, but at the same time, and perhaps precisely to escape the frenzy that surrounds us, he takes refuge in painting, creating ‘fantastic universals’, worlds that are distant, silent and different from anything we are used to. Landscapes that remind us of paintings of yesteryear such as the 15th-century backgrounds of Leonardo’s paintings or that we find in Flemish painting, but overwritten in a metaphysical key imbued with magic and wonder. He also carries forward the great painting technique of that painting, preparing the supports with chalk, painting in oil with continuous glazes and long drying times, one layer of colour after another until the desired result is achieved. The work is always a work in progress, in the pursuit of perfection it is continuously modified by adding and removing elements.

What makes Pedrazzi’s painting unique, apart from his undoubted technique, are the fantastic elements he disseminates in his works, tall dervish hats symbolising moral and spiritual elevation, a mystical fountain, an otherworldly sky, imaginary floral elements that almost obsessively cover everything.

That sense of figurative reality that is not real and that can be inscribed in that heterogeneous artistic strand defined as magic realism.

The objective representation that the term ‘realism’ highlights is accompanied, in this expression, by an adjective that evokes suspended and surreal atmospheres. Reality is in fact the starting point of a transfiguration that passes through imagination and wonder, capable of revealing the mystery behind the represented world.

Massimo Pedrazzi introduces us to the fascinating and subtly disturbing world of this artistic current with international repercussions, to which Italy has made a major contribution.

‘Magic is not only witchcraft: any enchantment is magic (…). Perhaps art is the only enchantment granted to man, and of enchantment it possesses all the characters and all the species: it is evocation of dead things, apparition of things far away, prophecy of things to come, subversion of the laws of nature, operated by the imagination alone.’

In Pedrazzi’s works we find a quiet narrative that conceals a sense of expectation and wonder, the impression of witnessing an inexplicable epiphany.

There are various subjects Pedrazzi likes to try his hand at: the already mentioned landscapes where the gaze is lost in the horizon flying over enchanted valleys suspended in time, female figures immersed in a luxuriant nature that is anti-naturalistic yet impetuous, the theme of the offering where a figure hands the viewer a gift, a metaphor for the possibilities we receive and can grasp in the face of life’s difficulties.

In continuity with the theme of ‘Crowds’, always dear to the painter, Pedrazzi proposed a series of very topical works in which he depicts the daily clash of the political world hidden behind a façade of respectability and thus abellished in form by its lush vegetation and colourful arabesques.

Finally, a series dedicated to Faces, young men with deep, restless eyes, their features distorted by a vibrant emotionality, left to emerge from dark backgrounds or enriched by his now typical vegetation teeming with details, anti-naturalistic colours and fantastic elements.