Project Description
Mauro Reggio ( Rome 1971 ), Rome, Aelian bridge
Oil on canvas cm 100 x 200, made in 2014.
INFO: if you need more information
«During the last year of the Academy of Fine Arts I stopped painting the usual models and still lifes to focus attention only on the urban landscape. What interested me was the architecture of the different buildings of different eras and styles and their forced approach. Rome offers countless views with these characteristics and then I went to work painting the various archeologies related to the architecture of the Baroque or twentieth century rationalism or the East Ring Road, considered by many a sort of “ecomostro” but that has always reminded me of the old film “Metropolis” directed by Fritz Lang and provokes surreal suggestions even in its decadent realism. In order to focus the architectures of the chosen subjects more carefully, I immediately stripped them of the elements that were foreign to me and therefore the perspectives of the squares and streets are devoid of men, automobiles, various signs, advertising posters».
With these words, the painter Mauro Reggio, considered by many to be the greatest Italian vedutist active in the current national artistic scene, tells the definition of his stylistic figure, achieved in a metaphysical and twilight tension that animates the gallery of Roman views that populate his production in recent years.
The painting that we present here is a view of the Roman bridge Elio, known to most as the Sant’Angelo bridge, one of the most famous buildings in the world, both for the regularity, symmetry, the opening of the light and the distance from the hair water of the arches, both for the nobility of the materials and the monumentality of the whole. Reggio highlights these peculiar characteristics of architecture, preferring a vision from below that, adopting a clever use of chiaroscuro and the play of shadows reflected in the water mirror of the Tiber, underlines the harmonious beauty of the building, surmounted by the orange sky dark, typical of the master’s palette, an “unlikely and surreal” chromatic choice, according to the same definition of the painter, which gives an alienating atmosphere to the whole composition, almost as if you were in a dystopian landscape created by the director Ridley Scott .
Graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts, Reggio’s works can be found at Palazzo Madama, seat of the Senate of the Italian Republic, in the Grand Hotel of Rome, in Bulgari stores all over the world. Of his pictorial production, wrote Luca Beatrice, Maurizio Calvesi, Rossana Campo, Paolo Manazza, Marcello Pera and Vittorio Sgarbi.
