| MAURO BETTI |
Catalogs | |
| Dipinti 2005 | Biography | |
Mauro Betti is an astute observer. He looks around him. His work acts as a filter, gathering all the symbols and signs of his surroundings, getting rid of the one that’s of no interest, using the rest. The result is a kind of summary, the bare essentials from a daily input of images: from television, internet, information, communication, advertising.
This is simplifying, in a complex way. Buy to simplify does not mean to render banal; rather, it means to lighten, as Italo Calvino would have it in Lezioni americane.
On the other hand, reading posters and images and recycling them went on throughout the twentieth century, from the early avant-garde on. But his interests lie less with the cultured areas of the previous century than in dealing with the material culture of daily life. He also focuses on people and their behaviour patterns.
For the monochrome areas of the painting Betti uses deliberately artificial colours, mostly rather loud: acid green, orange, shocking pink – unnatural colours which we nevertheless come across daily: in shop windows, on the coloured pages of glossy magazines, on supermarket shelves. These are our colour references, just as the earth of Siena was Simone Martini’s. Yet again, the beginnings of his quest can be traced back to the world.
Angela Madesani, A look at the world: the recent works of Mauro Betti, text in the catalog
