In the Karlin Studios exhibition, 'a strictly personal story', Maddalena Mauri represents her relationship to her 'landscape vision', in which she involves her own present and her imagery, almost like some XX century poets who, through their eyes, saw whole landscapes get populated and then disappear. She collects the matter: coloured, brushed lands. She summons them on the walls to let them rise. She does not prepare an exhibition with pictures, she defies the materials; it is the flexibility of the sign that speaks out, of the gesture that will entangle, form layers. 'A strictly personal story' unwinds across the walls through are action both joyful and endured because her paintings contain melancholy, joy, love and passion. As in a diary, it is often trustful, but also dramatic and enlivened, like swiftly drawing a curtain and uncovering a light, a shadow, a twilight, a dawn. Her intervention is no setting or environment because her aim is catching a deep need, measuring against the space. The passed-through and explored area bears further symbolic meanings that cross the geographical and cultural borders of her home place: either an afternoon in nothern Latium (Maremma), Tuscia region, the area she lives in or a sunset in Prague, where she is going to carry out her works. It will be necessary to read through the dust, where the material is subject to an operation that uses transformation to create a vision. This is a journey with its own beginning which will explore the already-existing ways and which will invent others, as in all personal stories, those ones that come with the wind as if held up in a REM phase (also called paradoxical dream). Here we get to the crux of the matter: Maddalena, with her performance, underscores for us the temporal element of the moments, the real frailty of life and things. The result will be matter, whose primary image will be replaced in time by another one; there will remain the shadow of a landscape that will later disappear with a breeze, as it were an alchemy transformation.

Antonio Arévalo

The year-round exhibition plan of Karlin Studios supported by:
Magistrát hl.m. Prahy, Ministerstvo kultury ČR

Media support:
Radio 1, Umělec, Atelier, Artyčok.tv, Radio Wave,Artmap