Enrico Maria Davoli

Professor of contemporary art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna

Alberto Malossi, animistic painting

There are many ways of depicting animal and plant life in its natural habitat, but all of them can be traced back -to a greater or lesser degree of approximation -to two essential approaches: the first being naturalistic-mimetic and the second schematic-ornamental. Each has mutually balanced advantages and disadvantages. 

The naturalistic-mimetic approach has the pedagogical and didactic powers that fascinate television documentary enthusiasts, photographers and birdwatchers. The spectator is almost like someone looking through a peephole, witnessing a scene that they presume to be totally truthful, because the creature on the other side is unaware that they are being watched. 

The schematic-ornamental approach, on the other hand, prompts empathic participation. Participation based, not on passive, detached viewing, but on an almost tactile contact, which restructures the images according to pre-established geometric warps, such as the weaving of a carpet or the folding of a sheet of paper in origami.

Alberto Malossi has undoubtedly opted for the second approach. His painting sets all things, both animate and inanimate, into mutual vibration, on wavelengths that give rise to ripples, fans and eddies. Movements that run through the painting, crystallising into neatly arranged particles according to the textures to which they are meant to correspond: grassy expanses, corollas, bushes, skies streaked with clouds.

Malossi's is a world that resembles the Flatlandof the eponymous novella (1884) by British writer, Edwin Abbott Abbott. The movements and actions of the creatures thatinhabit Flatland are not in three, but in two dimensions. Their flat, compressed, squashed existence is, from their standpoint, entirely natural and consequential. Apart from the satirical vein that runs through the novella, relating to Victorian society of the time, that world is the exact counterpart, modulated and stylised, of the world we envision in the more customary three dimensions. While three dimensions dilute, blur and dilate the visible, the two dimensions of Malossi's Flatlandiaintensify it, firm it up, compact it, with an effect closer to mosaic or inlay than to painting in the strict sense of the term.

So our attention is drawn not to mimesisbut, if anything, to its complement: mimicry. In other words, to that set of morphological and chromatic properties that cause everything in a natural environment to connect with all the others, as though they were all imbued by the same flow of energy, the same breath of life. So, reptiles crawl, birds fly, vegetation sways in the wind -so experience tells us -but in reality, the various movements could also be swapped over, with inanimate things coming to life, and living things immobilised like stones, to elude unseen but ever-present predators. 

The chain of life returns to display itself as it appeared to primitive humans: a magical device, devoted in equal measure -without any deviation from its original design -to life and death and, therefore, to eternity. To call Malossi's vision simply “ecological” could be rather limiting, inadequate to express how these images exist. It might perhaps be more appropriate use a term that is applied, in anthropology and the history of religions, to the primitive mentality: “animistic”. 

In its original meaning, unpolluted by superfluous intellectualisms, theanimistic state is a communion between -and with -things, which enables the subject to identify with the world, rendering it sacred. In this sense, every form of life is necessary; even stones are bearers of an essence that enriches the world and intensifies its vibrations. Malossi's painting tunes in to these frequencies, amplifying them for us to see and touch.