"Canto dolente d'amore (Van Gogh's last day)", the exhibition of paintings created by Matteo Massagrande, an artist of rare sensitivity and finesse, based on the theatrical monologue written by the curator-poet Marco Goldin, perfectly seals the exhibition itinerary of the great exhibition on Van Gogh in the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza. It tells the story of the man who, mixing his feelings with colour, created the 129 masterpieces gathered here.
Also for this reason, Matteo Massagrande's is more than a traditional exhibition. It is a four-handed project that unites words with images, where the boundaries between past and present, between art, emotion and catharsis become so weak that they merge. To lead visitors "into" a story that is, or becomes, everyone's.
"I loved. In every day of my life / and I wrote it so many times / and I painted it with my colors, / like a rushing water / and nothing can stop it”. Pronouncing these verses, through the voice of Marco Goldin, is Vincent van Gogh, slumped at the foot of a tree, his chest reddened by the blood that flows from the wound that tore his chest. Inflicted by his hand. To put an end to a life where love has remained a mirage, worse: something intensely offered but "which I have not had back".
It is a "sorrowful love song" that comes out of the parched lips of that man supported by the trunk. In the Auvers evening. “That tree is for a moment the center of the world, the place where everything in the universe converges”, writes Marco Goldin in the introduction to the large book/catalogue due out at the end of October. “A man is leaving this earth who has left a perennial trail, he has left a sign that will never be forgotten. This is why so many people feel so much love towards him. I wrote that monologue last spring, all of a sudden, on a Saturday afternoon… It was when I picked it up again that I felt a desire, this time a really strong desire. That a painter could fail to illustrate some scenes, which also seemed to me not to be lacking, but that he himself sang them, and colored them. So I thought of who could experience this same feeling, this same spirit. What I had put inside, burning life, in the "sorrowful song of love".
“I decided that this painter – continues Goldin – could only be Matteo Massagrande, whom I respect and love for the images he creates, but also for the true and authentic urgency of painting inside the wide, and sometimes painful, sea of feelings … Matteo agreed to do the painting on the “Love Song of Sorrows (Van Gogh's Last Day)” and freely chose – without being part of it as I had asked him – the scenes that most involved him… He made them become something of his, he dropped them into his own world, and that was exactly what I had hoped, wished would happen. That he could create images that were indeed born from my word, but equally had their own precision and their own absoluteness independent of my sentences. In short, they were his paintings and nothing else. Thus there is a word that rises strongly, yet gently, to my mouth as I look at the seven paintings, and first the more than twenty studies, which Matteo Massagrande has dedicated to the "Canto dolente d'amore": intimacy. These are images that are both timeless and yet timeless. They are part of it because they are part of life, but they are equally the destiny of "forever". Matteo Massagrande's painting, with its profound subtleties, accompanies its existence, its manifestation, its dissolution in certain mists that we have.
We look at these paintings together, because they are stations to which we have all approached and from which we have all departed. Not one is more important than another, because they stand before the eyes like a scent that rises, a silence that comes, a music that can be heard from afar, which is not fully perceived but one feels that it is there and spreads in the 'air. And this brings comfort, because the world is still beauty and it is wonderful to know that there are painters who know how to express this secret beauty, who know how to tell it. To make a song of it. Of love and nostalgia”.
Image: Matteo Massagrande, "he sitting under a tree, next to a wheat field", 2017 mixed technique on wood. 80×80
