Published: April 17, 2024
Here, it was Giuseppe Ungaretti who imported into Italy from Paris at the beginning of the last century the “redetermination of use” which at a certain point made cafés places where art mixed with people, from where every true artist knows how to take and give back to the public, in the public. And this subtle political action today takes shape and content precisely in the city of Teramo. And it was precisely between a coffee and a tea and some pasta that Mario Dal Mare (born Mario Lamberti) and Marino Melarangelo, looking at the spaces and the petrol walls and the large windows (therefore the light) of the Manari Caffè, a few months ago they thought about their intervention in the heart of their city, and in a place you wouldn’t expect it, consuming breakfasts and aperitifs at the bar. The riskiest aspect of their intervention was falling into the trap of decorativism, in the action of embellishment, in comfortable furnishings, in glossy furnishing architecture, which would have ended up compromising the clear political intentions that were at the basis of their work. ; but the decorative danger, as far as anyone knows, has been largely averted by the clarity of the work.
The work between the two artists took place in complete osmosis, with a generosity and trust that probably has no precedent in figurative art, and within a hyper-individualistic contemporary where we increasingly close ourselves off to talk to ourselves about ourselves and that’s it , dumb, deaf and blind to each other. Mario Dal Mare therefore made available to Marino Melarangelo one of his large canvases worked (lived, it would be more appropriate to say in the case of this artist) over the years which they decided to divide into four parts to make as many autonomous but dialoguing paintings. Melarangelo, then, intervened with his characteristic charcoal marks and graphic approach, managing to reinterpret Mario Dal Mare’s divided canvas in a journalistic key, thus acting as a pictorial mirror to the place for which the paintings are intended, and everything was transformed into a very successful artistic language and homage to the entire city of Teramo. In fact, the figures of illustrious people from Teramo can be seen in the paintings, such as the writers Melchiorre Delfico and Giannina Milli; like the singer-songwriter Ivan Graziani and a moving homage to the anthropologist Marta Iannetti. But the coup de théâtre of the entire work (this is where the political action completely takes place which averts any possible and misunderstanding decorativeism) occurs when inside one of the paintings (the one where we find Giannina Milli in the foreground, on the left, and Marta Iannetti, on the right) appears, at the back and in the centre, the figure of Maria the cat lady, a historic commoner character who took care of the cat colony that inhabited the Roman theater of Teramo, who would hardly have been welcome in a glittering café in the center of small or large cities in the Western world. Art, we can say thanks to this mature pictorial work, becomes political action when it escapes the usual (therefore consumerist) use of places, things and, alas, people.
MASSIMO RIDOLFI
