‘Mikado ‘190x200x16 cm Painted aluminium Year 2020 Corso Italia n 141.
The work belongs to the cycle called ‘chaotic structures’ in which the artist prefers three-dimensional installations where, through apparent chaos, he assembles materials such as aluminium, wood or pvc strips of various sizes and colours. In this case he uses painted aluminium, recalling the random arrangement of the famous game, probably of Chinese origin, also known as Shanghai. The playful aspect is central to Madì art and consequently to Mascia's work. The artistic object contains both signifier and meaning.
VINCENZO MASCIA | Biography
1957, Santa Croce di Magliano (Campobasso). He is an architect, artist and designer. His works can be found in private collections and museum institutions such as the MADI Museum in Dallas (U.S.A. ), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Latinoamericano de La Plata (Argentina), the Pinacoteca Civica ‘Franco Libertucci’ in Casacalenda (Campobasso), the Young Museum in Revere (Mantova), the Museo Civico d'Arte Contemporanea ‘Umbro Apollonio’ in San Martino di Lupari (Padua), the Museum of Artistic and Historical Excellence MAGI ‘900 in Pieve di Cento (Bologna), the MAGA Museum in Gallarate (Varese), the MAGMA Museum in Roccamonfina, the Civic Museum in Vibo Valenzia, the Madi Museum in Candelaria (Argentina), the International Centre for Outdoor Sculpture - Park Museum in Portofino (Genoa), the Outdoor Museum in Sorrento (Na). Vincenzo Mascia, a complex figure of architect, artist and designer, is a significant exponent of the International Madi Movement. Trained in Rome at the Faculty of Architecture of Valle Giulia, where he came into contact with Filiberto Menna, theoretician of analytical painting, Mascia soon turned to non-figurative art with particular attention to the results of Dutch Neoplasticism, Russian Avant-garde, Conceptual Art and Concrete Art. Of great importance is the comparison with twentieth-century masters such as Lucio Fontana, the inspiration for the cycle of works Sulle tracce di Fontana, extroflexed structures created by engraving cardboard surfaces with measured and rational signs that allow a glimpse of a colored background to "find light and color beyond the surface". In the reflections of the early years, the characteristic orientations of Mascia's production are identified: the crossing of boundaries between different artistic fields and expressive forms and the projection of the work in space to be understood as both the culture of the object and as art in the environment. It is no coincidence, therefore, that since his university years (1976-1982) Mascia has been fascinated by design and has approached the study of personalities such as Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Le Corbusier. At the end of the 1980s, his passion for design converged in ART DESIGN, a company dedicated to the production of objects and furnishing accessories designed by our artist. The series of works inspired by Memphis, a design and architecture collective founded by Ettore Sottsass, dates back to this experience. These are objects - clocks, benches, tables, display cases, mirrors and more - characterised by the presence of abstract volumes in the foreground that articulate with the geometric surfaces of the background. This activity helps define Mascia's aspiration to create objects with their own identity, detached from the mimetic interpretation of reality. In 1996, Mascia’s frequentation of the Milanese cultural environment and in particular his relationship with the Galleria Arte Struktura, directed by Anna Canali, encouraged him to join MADI, an international movement founded in 1946 in Buenos Aires by Carmelo Arden Quin, attributable to non-figurative artistic research through non-expressive, non-representative and non-symbolic forms. Mascia thus achieved a production free from the constraints of the mimetic interpretation of reality, characterized by extroflexed objects, articulated with unusual joints and geometries. In the footsteps of Carmelo Arden Quin, Mascia’s research, in an effective balance between freedom and play, contributes to the emancipation of the work from the frame. The intervention designed for the Portofino Park Museum, for Open 18 in Venice and for I-Design in Palermo is particularly representative of Mascia’s research. The primary elements of the work are the colored aluminum tubes arranged randomly, according to combinations and superimpositions. The work includes in Venice and Palermo the presence of a mirrored surface, capable of dialoguing with the surrounding environmental context and revealing the new possibilities of interaction between art, design and architecture. Mascia, underlines Serena Mormino, is “an artist of geometric shapes and decompositions that are well defined even when broken down” and is “a designer, because the playful and playful art typically Madì can also have a function in everyday life”. The same concept is used in the creation of the work “Mikado” included in the large project “Museo Outdoor” in Sorrento curated by SyArt. Mascia goes beyond painting in the traditional sense and creates a synthesis of the artistic discipline with architecture and design in order to achieve, as he himself declared, “the harmony of contrasting parts: order and disorder, full and empty, shiny and opaque, concave and convex”. Mascia’s success, confirmed by the attention of critics and the public encountered during his numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, lies precisely in the union of thought and phenomenon and in the ability to go beyond the boundary between idea and action, concept and everyday life, in harmony with his works made of light and colour beyond the surface.
