Pier Paolo Maggini Biography
Pier Paolo Maggini was born in Pisa in 1970 and is a self-taught painter. Slowly but stubbornly, Maggini embarks on a difficult and complex path. He studies, elaborates, builds and sometimes destroys by reinterpreting the painter's craft. His is a process of subtraction. The data, sometimes numerous and stratified in his paintings, are annihilated by the punctuality of the brush and the strength of the light. Photography is a medium that the artist uses to avoid any emotional mediation between the real world and its translation onto the canvas. We are on the border between reality and verisimilitude. Maggini finds his language in the density of colour, in the centrality of light and above all in the ability to give intensity to the various formal levels, like a director who calls the actors to participate. Maggini's universe is defined under a single denominator: the absence of any human trace and the story of solitude and desolation. The painter is interested in the relationship between things rather than their navigation in the human universe. Those empty and silent landscapes recall scenes from Antonioni's cinema. The paintings on display could be preparatory sketches for a storyboard for a film set. Like the chapters of a novel, each one tells its own story. It is like this in the "stages", where the human presence is felt only as an abstract entity, highlighting the condition of distressing loneliness that is felt even among so many people. The same is true between the "rails", in the "stations", or in the abandoned places of the "landfills", where things seem to have an autonomous life. However, in Maggini there is no remorse, nor regret for a life that seems lost. Instead, there is a serene awareness and acceptance of an inexorable destiny that is part of the flow of life. The brush quickly follows the lines and shapes of the landscape. Sometimes he hesitates and withdraws, leaving traces of our daily life, but always affirming his deepest beliefs. The strokes of light thus highlight elements that would otherwise go unnoticed. Maggini is intrigued by the details and poetics of our daily lives. Light is the means through which the artist communicates his moods and the vehicle of perception. At this point one wonders whether such a firm vision of the things that surround us does not lead us to a more complex reflection on the meaning of his painting. He participated with Nowhere Gallery in the
