Tondo's
Tondo's, the series of works created by the Lucca artist Mauro Moriconi, revolves around the crucial concept of image and its representability. Although in this new anthology of shots the photographic medium represents in part an element of continuity with the previous series - on the other hand, even the Un-familiar photo-engravings are the result of manipulations on Polaroid - this time the experimentation goes further and the support before shooting, which in fact does not happen. From the glossy surfaces, almost reflective, dreamlike landscapes emerge that are not anthropized, agglomerations of colors that refer to imaginative geographies of Ghirrian memory and to extraordinary inner worlds. The vision of such glimpses undermines the perception, both of the human eye and of the camera, confuses the sense of reality and illusion, stimulating in the observer surreal pareidolias that lead him to recognize in the morphism something attributable to the plane of the real. The impressionistic stains, the result of a meticulous work that combines manual skill and casualness, emerge as from a porthole and testify to a return to the artist's original training path in the field of painting and is also inspired by it for the circularity of the format, with the obvious reference to other famous Tondi, such as the Renaissance Tondo Doni. From Michelangelo to Ingrès, passing through Raphael and Caravaggio, the circular shape boasts a glorious past in the artistic field and an equally significant symbolic value. Emblem of perfection, totality and perennial renewal like the wheel of the flaming solar disc, the Tondo by Moriconi contains environments that are difficult to place in defined times and places. The outcrops of islands, the desertifications, the glaciations and the drifts of the continents that are likely to be glimpsed in these landscapes ignite the imagination and raise disturbing doubts about the origin and, above all, about the destiny of our ecosystem. Instead of remaking reality, in the words of the American philosopher Nelson Goodman, Moriconi's works contribute to the realization of an aesthetic experience in which vision is personal and perception becomes intimate. The gaze of the observer, beyond any cultural, experiential and formative parameter, filters and completes the meaning of works that tell a present that has renounced any claim to objectivity, where representing becomes more and more synonymous with revealing.
Paola Martini
