2017 Milan International Art Award
Justification for admission
“The selection of his work in this prestigious project attests to the value of his stylistic study in the contemporary artistic landscape. His presence confirms that creativity is one of the most important forms of the transmission of knowledge”.
Prof. Vittorio Sgarbi
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Luca Maggi’s art
Luca Maggi’s lunar portraits are undoubtely unique works of its kind, characterised by an original workmanship of the materials utilized by him, and a decisive and original artistic character. His art is well-delineated, made of harmonius compositions which support an immense design out of the ordinary. The artist shows to have acquuired in-depth technical knowledges and his works are the result of a studied meditation, in which nothing is left to the chance. Luca Maggi is a good artist with a polished aesthetic taste, a compositive and above all a unique and an original style throughout the contemporary artistic landscape. The structure of his lunar portraits is characterised by consistency and the balance of the composition that infuse the works of the artist with a sense of harmony. A work with a strong and well-structured design is able to give knowledge to art by giving it the faculty of becoming a mirror af an inner path. For Maggi, indeep, arts has an emotional purpose, his lunar portraits are the trace of a path that begins from the image to have access to the labirinth of our inner sphere. A wise and expert work which expresses, through an unusual visual code, its own authentic meaning.
Sandro Serradifalco
Art critic and director of Effetto Arte
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Domenico Scoglietti
President of ISSUP – International School of Studies for Universal Peace –
From the poet’s verses.
“che fai tu luna in ciel? dimmi che fai silenziosa luna?”, (“what do you do there, moon, in the sky? Tell me what you do, silent moon”) …which can be translated for everyone… (Giacomo Leopardi)
The moon emanates a particular fascination, linked to emotions, to the most profound feelings of the soul. Dreams, fantasy, emotion, the unknown… In astrology it is affiliated with the feminine side, to bodily fluids and menstrual flow, …planetary rulings of tides, shores… the nourishment of plants… the world of instincts, the obscure power of sentiment… From antiquity, from the date and time of birth, astrologers have been able to map out character, love, irrationality of passion and feeling. There is a thin bond binding us all, and we to the stars.
The moon is meant to represent the feminine, and also the feminine existing in man: creativity, dreams, going beyond the appearance of reason. In the works of Luca Maggi, in addition to the beautiful artistic achievement, something can be absorbed which is attached to our deeper self. Compliments to the artist.
Drmimì Scoglietti
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Piero Frattarelli
The emotion and abduction of the natural nightly spectacle offered to us by the moon transcends each one of us, our every will.
I’ve heard, mostly from humble individuals: “The emotions attacking me at night flow through me until exhaustion, and when missing, every vital heat is extinguished”.
Let’s now open the window of Luca’s study -the moon- offered in its endless neutrality, is the transcendental portrait of our existence. He views his craft completely as an apostolate: clutching the Moon, wrestling it against his chest, taking furious shots within, screeching whistles of distorted guitar notes, his gaze thrown through Space, all the petty compartments of a trivial vision pass through. This is undoubtedly why his portraits are so keenly felt by so many of us, even if we don’t clearly notice the full extent of it and proclaim, to those who are deaf, even in their admiration, the primordial role of art, the role to which each of us has the right to belong.
Every artist takes advantage of the universe, taking the malleable mask and introducing his own colour; offering it to us, more or less intact in appearance; in reality emptied of its substance, to which the painter has replaced with his own, this is where the lunar portraits are born- as Luca suggests (not figurative): his nature senses in the body a new soul, a personality hitherto born a stranger who, when intimately known, the model plots a face where the expressions of a consciousness, not his, the change and transfiguration, will be read, how mysterious alchemy fulfils it before our eyes, always making an unpredictable appearance each time? And here is the night -the moon- the centre of its bright waves making the sky shimmer with stars. Still, it remains just a drawing, just a preparatory shock of the two realities present: the exterior that yields and the interior that is triggered.
In the picture, or rather in the lunar portraits which Luca depicts from birth dates, each time from this sight, the pictorial touch starts to pivot in the same way as our mother, in her visionary, frustrating pain, giving birth to a new life and heightening the frantic dance of the elements: the vacuum of the sky becoming the centre of an astonishing astral gait, the shaking of ether by the effects of the sun’s reflective fire, breaking open the craters of cosmic eruption and colour! With all its brass and pigments, it is linked to a primordial harmony.
Piero Frattarelli
