Nicola De Maria ^©  

(1954)

Provenance:

Giorgio Persano Gallery, Turin, as per stamp on the reverse;

Tornabuoni Arte, Florence;

Private collection

Exhibitions:

“Nicola De Maria: Libertà Segreta Segreta”, Retrospettiva Kunsthalle Basel, from October 2nd to November 6th 1983;

“Parole cinesi”, Kunsthaus, Zurich, from November 28th 1985 to February 16th 1986;

“Parole cinesi”, Kunstmuseum Bonn, 1986.

Literature:

"Maestri moderni e contemporanei. Antologia scelta 2010", exhibition catalogue Tornabuoni Arte, Florence, 2009, pp. 110-111.

"Modern and Contemporary Art. Anthology Choice 2014", exhibition catalogue Tornabuoni Arte, Florence, 2013, pp. 100-101.

"Modern and Contemporary Art. Anthology Choice 2021", exhibition catalogue, Tornabuoni Arte, Florence, 2020, pp. 144-145

Photograph of the work authenticated by the artist

-

The titles of the works of Nicola De Maria (Foglianise, 1954), as for the monumental work of 1981 presented here, are always of a poetic nature and act as keys capable of providing an additional way of access to the inner world. The large oil on canvas presented here is among the first great works of the artist. Of undoubted pictorial quality the backdrop entirely painted: a sky full of clouds on which appear three candies, the desire of every child. The evocative title, in fact, perfectly tells the poetics of De Maria and the fairy-tale universe from which she is inspired. In this fantasy world, animated by geometric elements and simple signs, the chromatic component is the real protagonist, expressed through bright colors. More than a figurative rendering of the visible world, each painted form is a personal vision of the otherwise invisible essence of things.

Heir to the great tradition of fresco painting, Nicola De Maria is the original inventor of a pictorial language capable of animating ceilings and walls of a vital impetus, whose colors do not illustrate but create. The artist wishes to respond to this expressive urgency by celebrating «the triumph of art through the lyricism of painting». His ability to overcome pictorial conventions, rejecting every academic system, put him, at the end of the seventies, among the initiators of the movement of Transavanguardia.

The artist describes himself as «who writes a poem with his fingers dirty with color, while dog and cat, closed in the lair of the heart, are painting and poetry fighting for the triumph of art». Each picture or environmental work is the rendering in bright colors of the predisposition of the artist to embody the figure of the poet, along with those of the singer and the narrator. (from the biography of the artist by the Castello di Rivoli, Turin)