the painter’s room #7

Massimiliano Zaffino

They are imaginary but plausible places, bizarre but plausible landscapes, those who the galleria AreaB of Milan presents in the personal “Massimiliano Zaffino. Deep events on the surface ", curated by Ivan Quaroni.
From 27 September to 9 November 2021, a corpus of about fifteen unpublished works - oils on canvas and collage - made between 2018 and the 2021, places the public in the presence of a quietly distorted reality, represented by completely unique physical and climatic phenomena, with which we will probably have to learn to live with in the near future.

In the familiar landscapes of Zaffino, where humanity is engaged in leisure and relaxation activities, unexpected atmospheric effects break in: volcanic eruptions, magnetic distortions, bizarre phenomena of refraction of light, fluid eddies and prodigious levitations that have nothing apocalyptic about them.
The destabilization of reality appears, in fact, normalized. Chaos and imbalance are part of everyday life, they are natural phenomena.
Be it paintings or collages, at the center of Massimiliano Zaffino's visual research is the landscape intended not as a documentation of real places, but as a construction of possible worlds.
The scenarios represented by the artist are imaginary, but explorable and passable by the gaze precisely because of their plausibility.
To achieve this alienation effect, the relationship between photography and painting is the basis of his work, between the photomontage technique and the pictorial practice.
The project of the paintings was born, then, from a photographic composition between different places, points of view, different perspectives and geographies that painting then reunites in a form with its own recognizable coherence.

"The quiet distortion of reality in Zaffino's landscapes - explains the curator - is not only the product of a formal and aesthetic investigation into the combinatorial potential of art through the logic of photographic collage applied to painting, but it can be interpreted as the premonitory representation of a more than near future in which what appears extraordinary today will be normal ".