The origin of my artistic work is a deep love for freedom conjugated to a strong need to tell stories and to tell the public about myself. Is there anything more free and powerful than fantasy? As claimed by Leonardo himself “the painter is lord of every kind of person and of all things”. This “power” of the painter has always fascinated me. Painting makes me feel like a modern Scheherazade, the heroine of the Arabian Nights, which saves her life thanks to her skills as a weaver of tales. The knowledge of suffering has freed my mind of constraints and influences. To express my perceptions, which of course are reflected in my artistic activities, I like to quote a phrase by Pico della Mirandola: “You will be able to degenerate into the lower things, at the level of the brutes; You will be able, according to your will, regenerate yourself into the higher things that are divine. ” The thread running through my work is represented by a deliberate mix of genres and themes. In fact, I want to create a form of “cultural syncretism” in painting, where you have the perfect and harmonious fusion of different disciplines of human knowledge.
Now I will tell you a story, the story of “the fox and the mask”, written by Phaedrus, a poet who lived in the Julio-Claudine age, and resumed later by Jean de La Fontaine (under a different title: “the fox and the bust “).
The fox, one day, he saw – by accident – a tragic mask: “What a beautiful head!” He exclaimed. “Too bad it has no brain!”
(Personam tragicam forte vulpes viderat: “o quanta species” inquit “cerebrum non habet!”).
In a reality like the contemporary one, dominated by appearances, only a keen observer (played by the fox) manages to penetrate the substance of reality and see beyond exteriority, the emptiness that hides.
Mariangela Bombardieri
The imaginary world of Mariangela Bombardieri or The research of the philosopher’s stone.
It is not easy to penetrate Mariangela’s narrative woods – it is a steep path, treacherous, full of allusions, literary references, citations, whispers and screams from the past that gain new valences and different meanings. The “suspension of incredulity” invoked by Umberto Eco in order to allow the reader to get into the story is not enough for a quiet journey. More is needed. The look of the innocence must be recaptured, the purification from the ugliness of the world, the hope in a better future. “A people without stories is intended to die of cold,” sang the poet from the steppe… and here we are – ready to sit around the fire and dream. A dip into the lemon yellows, into the most intense roses and reds, the deep blues, into the light cadmium greens, into the dazzling magentas – Mariangela’s palette reopens for us the doors of our spent childhood and invites us to enter. And how can we not be inexorably drawn to? We enter into this fantastic world, like Alice in Wonderland, “beyond good and evil” … We are not greeted by any Mad Hatter. The surprise is much bigger! The categories of time and space are distorted: in one immense and colorful space we discover a horizontal time where everything is simultaneous, contemporary. Anything can happen before our eyes. Characters of myth can talk to those of history – Ulysses with Homer , Aeneas with Virgil ! And, in this world without reality nor fiction, Dante could meet Quasimodo and Eduardo have coffee with … Plautus. But there’s more: even the subjects of the paintings of the past come to life and become actors of Mariangela’s fables. The sculptures also are awakened from their sleep of stone and interact in the story – they are colored and they lose the monumentality in order to obtain new meanings. Heroes, elves, butterflies, horses and frogs, commanders and squires, victims and perpetrators: everything becomes a symbol, everything is made as moved by invisible strings, hanging from Mariangela’s fingers, the great puppeteer of this vast array of characters. Painting after painting, it turns out, as in fairy tales, that every framework leads to a moral, a reflection on our times, useful for roughing of that rough stone that is the human being. There the philosopher’s stone! This is the meaning of a palette that doesn’t give up to pure colors, that does not abdicate even in front of the horror of violence. Here the value of the brushes dipped into the all costs-optimism … “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, “Et in Arcadia ego” … ..but “beauty will save the world.” And the optimism of Mariangela along with her colorful glance add that the world will save the beauty.
Giovanni Marziano