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Artist Statement for Carlo Mirabasso
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Carlo Mirabasso was born in 1959.
In 1979 he received his diploma from the 1st Art High School in Rome.
In the 1980s and ’90s, in addition to painting, he worked in the field of advertising design and illustration, following a path that would lead him to make a name for himself as a professional artist.
In the early 1990s he began painting his first metaphysical compositions, perfecting a personal pictorial technique on wood panels, which would become fundamental for his research.
Since 1996 e has devoted himself exclusively to painting.
He takes parts in shows and has exhibited his work in Rome, Milan, Bari, Turin, Assisi, Teramo, Verona...
He lives and works in Bettona, in the region of Umbria.
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Carlo Mirabasso’s painting has deep roots in the spiritual Umbrian land, and it is in Umbria that the artists has decided to live, choosing for his home the noble Bettona, a short distance from Assisi and from Perugia, international centers of spirituality and culture and places of great architectural beauty which, like every other city and town in Umbria, are an example of care for the artistic heritage, which in this region is preserved and protected in all its parts, from the antefixes of the roofs to the frescoes in the churches.
The painting of every artist is, of course, tied to his personal history, and Mirabasso’s history, like that of every painter, starts from the moment his calling first manifested itself. In this case it was revealed in his early adolescent years, when he discovered he was very skillful in what Michelangelo called “the art of making figures”. And following, without even knowing it, the lesson that De Chirico taught himself as a boy, he practiced painting by copying the works of art studied in books and in museum rooms. Among his scale copies of famous paintings there is also a Raphael “Deposition” purchased by the Borghese Museum as an example of study of the classics.
So his free practice as an artist and diligent study to attain a Fine Arts diploma would provide solid foundations for his artwork.
A complementary study of graphic arts and an experience in creative work, which led him to become a valuable element in the field of publishing and advertising art, would further contribute to making his training more complete and varied. Together with this rich preparatory background for his work as a painter there is, not secondarily, his choice of lifestyle which can be simply described by the old saying, “A man is not a man until he has planted a tree, built a house and reared a child.” Mirabasso has set deep roots into an exemplary territory for building: the serene land of Francis of Assisi, and he built that life’s house that is called “family”, had two children, and planted more than one tree, because he is of solid farming origin, and on his grandfather’s land, during the happy summer seasons of his childhood, he soon came to know the incomparable relationship with nature that only someone who has planted a plant and watched it grow can have. Today, looking at Mirabasso’s work, his decision to abandon the chaos of the city to live immersed in the quiet of a human-scale dimension appears to be one of the most certain in his life. Because it is from this solid interweaving of artistic preparation with his life that his painting springs.
The most evident connotation of this painting, to start with, is its verticality. This tendency toward upward movement, privileging erect, pointed shapes, is a evident sign of a clear vocation for spirituality that asserts itself not only in the architecture of the buildings, houses, bell towers, and even cypress trees in their midst, standing lance-shaped, pointing upward like pointers. A spirituality that, however, does not espouse the austerity that seems to be unavoidable when breathing the atmosphere of Umbria. Mirabasso, instead, reflects its sunniness. The skies defining the horizon of his walled landscapes are lit by the joyful pink of the summer dawns or the intense blue of the clear spring days that announce fragrant blooms.
In these landscapes, where Umbria and its legend are breathed, but also the loveliness of every place in our country of walled towns (Pienza, Feltre, Lucera, or any other Italian town preserved within medieval, cyclopean or Messapian walls, in any case protected from the building havoc of the past decades), with the houses, castles, bell towers, arches, and cypresses, there are also faces, mostly young, sweet female faces, or stern historical profiles that give variety to the enchantment.
In a painting style that is apparently simply by virtue of its linearity, on the contrary the mathematical construction of Mirabasso’s walled landscapes reveals the harmony of the perspectives balanced by a masterly movement of assonances and dissonances, a synthesis of all the lessons of great painting, from Giotto’s perspective to those of the Cubists.
I believe that by overlaying the lines of a musical staff over the tips of these cypresses “of unmatchable height”, we could read a sequence of notes corresponding to a delicate harmony. Because these paintings are permeated with a secret, musical enchantment, which is also the non-secondary result of a polishing of the painting, as in Mirabasso’s art, to chisel fineness. Then we discover that it is inside the aesthetic charm of his landscapes that especially what attracts the most and makes them so communicative lives: their capacity to carry a comforting message.
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