UN-REALITY is a journey through glimpses of the Italian urban landscape, to be experienced in a balance between the real and the surreal: a path unfolding through silent squares and monuments, deserted bridges and ring roads that lead us from Rome, Bologna, then Parma and Milan, back to the city of Varese itself, depicted in several previously unseen works.
DISSIPATION
“I’m discovering that the eternal, for me—viewed from a parking orbit—is the permanence of the provisional,”wrote Guido Morselli in Dissipatio H.G., one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, born in Bologna and who lived between Gavirate and Varese.
Morselli imagined waking up in a world and society stripped of human presence and, with it, of time itself. He was left alone, suspended in an existence of indeterminate duration, accompanied only by the things of life—objects, spaces—as well as his own thoughts, sensations, emotions, and fears.
When we confront the geometric and chromatic power of Mauro Reggio’s works—head-on and with open eyes—it is not difficult to rediscover the echoes of those pages, among the most important chapters of twentieth-century literature:
“Everything in its place and in order, but motionless and outside of time, because it is man who gives time to things, and not a man in sight. Not one remained.”
In the works of the Roman painter, we find—happily renewing one another—the precision of academic training, the chromatic richness of the Scuola Romana, a metaphysical sensibility, surrealist wit, and unmistakably, a distinctly contemporary urban sensitivity. Mauro Reggio strips monuments and cities of all that is superfluous and current; he frees them from dirt, graffiti, traffic, fumes, and people, leaving them in profound silence and revealing a purified, desolate vision. “Chrysopolis is empty.”
SILENCE
Thanks to a highly refined use of color and a preference for bright, disorienting tones—by now a distinctive hallmark of the artist and a near-central element in each work—every architectural presence is so emphasized that it emerges from the canvas in its purest essence. Mauro Reggio’s painting gives voice to form and gives form to silence, allowing the mind to travel unburdened through that silence.
The dissipation of all disturbances—both physical and emotional—contributes to the suspension of the urban atmosphere, recreating an unreality that deafens every perceptive sensation.
“What creates silence—and its opposite—is ultimately the human presence, whether welcome or unwelcome; and its absence. Nothing can replace it in this effect. And the silence born of human absence, I realized, is a silence that doesn’t flow. It accumulates.” – Wrote Morselli.
Each canvas is therefore charged with absence and tension—between light and shadow, straight lines and curves, fullness and emptiness, warm and cool tones. We feel both welcomed and threatened, observers and the observed. We find ourselves visitors to an “impeccable vacuum,” as the curator describes it in the critical essay accompanying the exhibition. Our spatial (proxemic) and visual compass is muffled; our thoughts compressed to the point of potentially exploding in every direction.
THE IDEAL REAL
The sense of estrangement that Mauro Reggio’s paintings convey does not stem from an element of fiction: his work is rooted in reality, in the spaces and cities we traverse and inhabit every day. Yet the work is not a realistic or photographic reproduction of the urban form. The artist selects perspectives, light, and color—therefore shaping the perceptual impact of space—and creates suspended, never unequivocal atmospheres. Through this careful synthesis and purification, we rediscover the essential (ideal) forms of reality, and it is precisely in the rediscovered silence that they strike us—loudly, and without warning.
The dissipation of human presence and the meticulous “cleansing of jarring details” are necessary so that “beauty itself—the bare bone of beauty—can be experienced without obstruction,” as Redaelli notes.
In this beauty devoid of precise temporal moments—where one sees the colors of dawn and another the atmospheres of dusk, where one finds peace and another gets lost.
It is the sky, then, that often bears the most unnatural hues in the scene, and “is ultimately chosen to exalt everything else, to make it stand out beyond the canvas,” notes the curator. Thus we find lilac skies, greens, and oranges—not mere backdrops to human works but imposing presences that rise both against and in favor of the architecture below, magnifying it. Absolute, undisturbed tones. Muffled, impenetrable skies dominated by a surreal calm and gravity that weigh on the city—where no movement of the human soul truly finds resonance, and where every inner storm is simultaneously inhibited.
Towards the end of the visual experience of this exhibition, irony emerges, always accompanying the loving yet anxious gaze we cast upon the distortions of the present. One might think—look how vast and unfathomable human achievement is, and how superfluous we, the creators, seem in comparison.
We all clearly remember when, just a few years ago, TV screens showed images of those deserted and silent cities—images that today seem increasingly like a shared but imaginary past. At the time, we watched them with fear and wonder: it took so little—our own disappearance—to restore those places to their imperturbable beauty.
Or, as Morselli finally wrote, “O people, did you want to fight pollution? Simple: just eliminate the polluting race.”