Massimo Cova: between reason and play, by Pere Puiggròs

There are many parameters that could make up a work of art and, depending on what they are, there will be different formal outcomes of the piece and its relationships, beyond formalism, with the author and spectator. In my opinion, the parameters that Massimo Cova uses display impeccable faith in the possibilities of a work of art for generating beauty, knowledge and ethics (can that which is not beautiful be true?), and this faith is accompanied by enthusiasm for the on-going discovery of new possibilities, of an increasingly more inclusive depth, of aesthetic and conceptual amplitudes that are continually expanded as they are explored, and play, the play of the wise man who smiles in the face of valour when, by escaping from these parameters just as soon as they have been achieved and affirmed, he lets his intuition fly and creates a new pictorial universe. He lets his hands, his eyes and his heart do the thinking, playing hide-and-seek with mental reasoning and knowledge. Massimo Cova almost always reveals a timeless beauty: a synthetic quality can be sensed that brings to mind both Greek statues and the strangeness of Matisse, as if insinuating that behind every formal expression there lies a provocative strategy that seeks to find the spectator’s soul, which defies their artistic beliefs, plays with them and with all of art history, and this may be why it is so credible.

Pere Puiggròs