Alberto D’Atanasio

Specialized in History of Art, Prof. Alberto D’Atanasio is a R.O. of Aesthetics of Visual Languages, Theory of Perception and Psychology of Form, responsible for the Pegasus Cataloging Cultural Heritage for research and laboratory analysis for the attribution of works of art, as well as curator (including the recent Van Gogh Turin exhibition 2019) and writer.

Critical recall of July 2019

Andreas McMuller

Andreas McMuller, is the artistic name of Andrea Centrone, but after having known his works first and then the man I understood that his name of art was the right one. Sometimes the names choose the person to become a character, because the mask does not hide but rather reveals the true face, the meaning of an existence. It was the pseudonym, for a particular conjecture that Carl Gustav Jung called "synchronicity", to choose man and to emphasize more the vocation to live for art and to allow works to give meaning to life.

Andreas McMuller He was born in Verona in December 1966 but his atelier where he invented his works is in Cadelbosco (RE), Italy.

At the age of seven he took his first photographic image with a Rolleiflex. A child who, however, had already understood the difference between looking and seeing, a child who knew how to treasure the teachings of his family. A composite family, a particular that was fundamental for the maturing of those knowledge that over the years transmuted into skills, attitudes, talent that is still evident in its stylistic code.

From her Austrian grandmother she learned the precision and order, from life in Puglia she learned the awareness of joviality and joy, from the South Tyrolean aunt the ability to capture beauty in everything, from the smallest to the immensity, from the Veronese mother he had the gift of creativity.

In 1991 with a Nikon F3 he took his first photo for work. From then until 2001 he alternates reporter photography for jerky work for "creative vocation".

In 2012, a painting by Monet exhibited in the Genoese exhibition "From Gauguin to Van Gogh" opens up new scenarios and reflections that flow into a new artistic path. A journey that Andreas has visited with his soul and allows him to better recognize the archetypes that until then have formed him and called him to express his poetry in images.

He studies, researches, meditates and performs elaborations of considerable artistic importance.

It is in this period that he receives awards and prizes during national and international exhibitions.

His making art is a true search for the subject who reveals himself in space with light.

The space that he builds is not perceived with reason, neither serve nor abscessed nor ordered, it is a space that smacks of a universe, of boundless thoughts. In this space darkness is not the absence of light, but a place where form, retaining brightness, reveals the knowledge of a thought that identifies with the subject.

It is in this dark space that light reveals itself by illuminating the form. The shadow is not consciousness, it is not an obscure presence of matter that opposes luminous immateriality. In the work the poetry of Andrea McMuller is revealed in the details and as a whole, it is as if, with the photo shoot, he had only discovered something that was already there, he was there present and alive in the matter. In immanence the artist has only detected the object by illuminating it so that perception becomes dialogue, communication. Andreas McMuller sets the spell and makes it become real presence, memory, poetry.

The works of Andreas are not only images and representations of a feminine that expresses unspeakable beauty, each of his works becomes rather the genesis of a research that continues, continues beyond the figure. What he wants to represent is a sort of gap, a bridge that connects the image to the imagined figure. Each of his works has the strength of a real evocation in him.

All the images that Andreas studies, publishes and exhibits lead the observer to get lost in space and it is precisely in this bewilderment that one has the possibility of rediscovering a new rationality. It is the Neoplatonic essence that constituted the Aesthetics of Buonarroti.

After disorienting us his figures lead us to an island, they allow us a landing just in that form in which Aphrodite found manifestation.

Each of his works is the search for that feminine, essence of the goddess who from the original Chaos, from the primeval black, created the Cosmos, the Summa Beauty.

Photography, for Andreas, becomes an instrument through which he gives figuration to feelings, such as voluptuousness, passion, relives that boy who paws inside him and who feels neither the weight nor the constraint of time and age.

Andreas' studio draws on and is part of the research that was the Caravaggesque aesthetic in the first half of the seventeenth century. Darkness and darkness become necessary entities for the light to manifest itself, giving form to the contrast that allows Veritas to appear.

This is why his images hold light and make it reveal, open a path to true knowledge.

This is why Caravaggio becomes the primary source for reading Andreas' art making. He stops time in an absolute manner, using what is Veritas, evident matter, flesh. And this is how matter takes on the luminous and theological connotations of Lux. Veritas is therefore naked, not because the nude is more beautiful, but because it is sacred, as it is represented in the figure on the right in the painting by Tiziano Amor sacred and profane love.

The nude is sacred, it allows the union of two absolute and contrasting entities: transcendence and immanence.

Only the artist knows and can create a new balance from what is in opposition and in conflict. The contrast in the art of Andreas McMuller becomes harmony, melody, grace and opens the way for a space in which the observer gets lost, rediscovers the pleasure of feeling, of feeling, sinking in that unique, infinite sea that allows find himself.

Alberto D’Atanasio