On the ground floor of the seventeenth-century Palazzo Smeraldi in the heart of Parma, everything has remained as it was on 12 July 1994. The open tubes, the oils just diluted, the white linen jacket soaked in a thousand colors leaning next to the easel, the cigarette reduced to cigarette butt and just sketched sheets.
Carlo Mattioli, born in Modena in 1911, moved away forever in his Parma.
Now, twenty years after his disappearance, those large rooms vibrant with memories, a veritable sanctuary of art and artistic creativity, have rediscovered the vital breath that permeated them during the Maestro's work. Many of the intellectual degrees of a century of our culture have passed through these rooms, writers, poets, directors, photographers, journalists, art historians and critics, attracted by the charisma of the solitary artist from Parma.
“I went to see Carlo Mattioli in Parma”, says Enzo Biagi. “I saw his cozy and ancient studio, beyond the palace courtyard, with the ancient stones blackened by time and mists. I didn't know him and in front of him I rediscovered a sensation of adolescence, when for the first time, at the Caffè della Borsa, in Bologna, I saw Morandi. The scent of cleanliness, of moral rigor and, in the tall and severe figure, something of a nun."
“Mattioli takes me to the apartment that serves as his studio in Parma, cool rooms, high ceilings… a studio that seems about to turn into an art gallery, so many recent and less recent paintings have found a place along the walls. The only “irregular” subject is the artist's work jacket, a daubed casualty, almost a reflection of the palette”, recalls the poet Vittorio Sereni.
Mattioli's strong personality, his history, his vast cultural interests, his passions emerge by immersing himself in the places that saw him create and which today come back to life.
Since the artist's death, the Archive has organized important exhibitions at the museum of the cathedral of Barcelona in Luxembourg (1998), at the Tour Fromage in Aosta (2000), at the National Gallery of Parma in 2004, at the Braccio di Carlo Magno in the Vatican and at the Morandi Museum in Bologna to celebrate the centenary of the artist's birth (2011), at the Musma in Matera in 2013, just to name a few. The Archive has also taken steps to catalog not only the works but also the precious documentary material kept in the studio, without dispersing anything, if anything by acquiring from the market works that were considered indispensable for documenting Mattioli's artistic development.
The thousands of papers and documents, the books, drawings and oils were photographed and studied, to then be put back in the order that the Master had chosen. Constituting one of the most complete archives among those of great artists of our twentieth century.
Starting from 20 March 2015, these large rooms will be open to the public for the first time, by reservation, for two days a week, not "museumed" but preserved in their original spirit and appearance.
The spaces where the Master worked will indeed become a place of storytelling, meeting and comparison open to all the arts with the creation of exhibitions and cultural events in general that look overall at the artistic, literary and musical culture of the twentieth century that the Artist, though elusive to every attempt to place him in a precise belonging to the avant-garde of his time, he deeply knew, embraced or rejected.
In fact, the Carlo Mattioli Foundation is in the process of being set up with the aim of protecting, enhancing and promoting the work of the Maestro. The Foundation will complete the work of cataloging and archiving the publication of the general catalog of paintings, works on paper and sculptures, will promote research on the painter as well as editions, temporary exhibitions and conferences.
The advisory body of the Foundation will be the Scientific Committee which boasts important names in Italian culture. The Committee will collaborate with the Board of Directors in drawing up the general lines of the Foundation and the annual activities of the Studio Museo Carlo Mattioli.
Simultaneously with the opening of the Studio Museum, the Foundation intends to publish an important, exhaustive monograph which will also make up the catalog of Mattioli's work, together with a critical anthology of in-depth analysis, entrusting the curation to the art historian Luca Massimo Barbero .
