Presentation of Elisabetta Pozzetti

They appear slowly, they emerge from the depths of the soul and from the muddy sediments of thought. Relicts surviving the omnivorous consumerist culture appear in their representative shape. A meagre dinner table with an empty dish and resting cutlery waits in silence for the dust to stratify its memory. Meanwhile, fossils from the past, now full of life, escape from the calcifying stone, return gasping due to their long apnoea. Ancient rock engravings come back to life and restart their suspended history. The “bull-bison” and the “hunchbacked Mediterranean bull”, resting its  seem to float on the monochromatic wall in an uncertain run. The animals of a bestiary that has never been fully catalogued by science, however deeply loved and respected, march in close order. They overcome the inaction of the paper, concentrating themselves in turpentine semblances, in meaningful structures that evoke the removal of the material coat with the solvent. It is what the human being actually does, in his long march to destruction, obliterating all the species, first humiliating, and then erasing them. In the works of Massimo Cova nature is compensated for so many outrages and unjustified violence, indiscriminately perpetuated. Blind hatred that glows red in “Thank you”, dotting the world with eternally rotting wounds. But the answer is not long in coming and it is a completely personal answer: handprints sealing a refusal and an attempted rebellion against complete annihilation. A desire for possession and withholding a reality that, like sand, crumbles, falling onto the floor. Massimo, with clenched fists, collects it and kneads the grainy dust onto the surface of the sheet, dragging it within the dense substance, re-qualifying it with meaning, a sense of belonging, according to which we all shall return to dust. The portraits follow each other, each one increasing the intensity of the gesture until the features become exhausted. They warn us, pulvis es et in pulvere reverteris. Meanwhile, the table paints two lonely omelettes peeping in a centrifuge of energy. The feet of the table of oneself, and fragments of a newspaper, frame new bottles on improbable tables, with folded or steeply inclined surfaces. A vanishing point resists and emerges from the essence of the Po valley. An old bike with wide handlebars and big wheels waits trustingly to be rescued from the shadows. Leaning against the brown chrome fog, he glimpses new horizons. Massimo grabs them on our behalf. The journey starts again.

Elisabetta Pozzetti