MATtam 78

Manto Arte Temporanea | Temporary Art Manto
short exhibitions in found spaces

Sala Attilio Regolo del Giardino Segreto | Palazzo Te | Mantua

Maurizio Donzelli

Giardino segreto

Sunday May 25th 2025
only between 10:30 AM and 12:30 PM

In my case, tapestry, or the fascination with tapestries, is partly an obsession and partly an actual method of artistic work. This method is not based on logic or rational analysis of the symbolic and ornamental motifs I encounter and which I choose from time to time from ancient images, but on a process of rethinking and re-imagining the images themselves. Through the study and observation of these ancient tapestries I permit myself an exploration and reinterpretation of the visible/invisible potentially contained therein, but also an investigation into my own possibilities and abilities to extract from these traces from the distant past something new and surprising for me. Ancient tapestry, at least that which I love most, I find in a specific historical period from the Middle Ages to the threshold of the Renaissance. In it, I first trace a number of very distinctive narrative processes that I love: the absence of perspective, strongly ornamental elements, dreamlike and enigmatic themes where the narrative structure is fantastic with fairy-tale and chimerical traits.
It is from these premises and from these fascinations that my subsequent manipulations are born, images where fragments repeatedly remixed become something simultaneously unknown and familiar to me.
I believe it is pointless or even harmful to try to describe the content of these images of mine. On the contrary, one of the reasons why I put a tapestry into production is precisely when I recognize in it something attractive, something stimulating, precisely because it is unknown and mysterious; an image that I cannot understand but only feel, an image that is both near and far.

Maurizio Donzelli was born in Brescia in 1958, the city where he lives and works. An intellectual artist with a background ranging from philosophy to anthropology, he has developed a research focused on the problem of the image understood as a potential place of concentration and alteration of visual memory, declining it in works that experiment with different materials and techniques, with the aim of providing the public with an infinite potential of suggestions and iconic references.

"Relying on the sensitivity of the gaze, one deepens the grammar of the composition, beyond the dynamic and passionate grace of colors and shapes. Donata Negrini

Co-production with