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拍品專文
Nicola de Maria often spoke of a 'deep and sometimes violent nostalgia' for his native Foglianise mountains near Naples, where he lived until he was twelve. Regno dei fiori ('Kingdom of Flowers') is among a great number of works in which de Maria incorporates vivid memories from his early life. Executed in 1985, Regno dei fiori continues a theme that de Maria began to explore in a small group of drawings and a large wall painting of the same name some two years earlier, using a similarly explosive palette to expressively render the jagged semi-geometrical flowers and mountains.
The painting exhibits the artist's signature style of intuitively and loosely applied geometry. His paintings achieve a feeling of great fluidity partly through a process employed by de Maria that was similar to the Chinese Souei-pi ('as the brush runs') writing style, a traditional form of storytelling commonly used during the Ts'ing dynasty. De Maria paid frequent tribute to this style by giving some of his paintings from the early 1980s titles that include the names of Chinese poets from the Ts'ing era. Although he has spent a great deal of his career scribbling in sketchbooks, he does not use these drawings to pre-plan the exact composition of his paintings. As the playful and lively nature of works like Regno dei fiori clearly indicate, the nature of de Maria's artistic experiments is always unique.
An important feature of de Maria's painting is the way in which he heavily works he outer edges of his canvases. This creates a sense of the viewer looking through a window or doorway onto the scene beyond. In Regno dei fiori, with its geometrical forms in an environment comprising a foreground and a horizon, de Maria has consciously created a tension between the abstract design and the viewer's automatic recognition of the all too familiar depiction of a landscape. In this way de Maria visually invokes an appreciation of his childhood homeland with all the freshness and youthful energy of a child's vision.
The painting exhibits the artist's signature style of intuitively and loosely applied geometry. His paintings achieve a feeling of great fluidity partly through a process employed by de Maria that was similar to the Chinese Souei-pi ('as the brush runs') writing style, a traditional form of storytelling commonly used during the Ts'ing dynasty. De Maria paid frequent tribute to this style by giving some of his paintings from the early 1980s titles that include the names of Chinese poets from the Ts'ing era. Although he has spent a great deal of his career scribbling in sketchbooks, he does not use these drawings to pre-plan the exact composition of his paintings. As the playful and lively nature of works like Regno dei fiori clearly indicate, the nature of de Maria's artistic experiments is always unique.
An important feature of de Maria's painting is the way in which he heavily works he outer edges of his canvases. This creates a sense of the viewer looking through a window or doorway onto the scene beyond. In Regno dei fiori, with its geometrical forms in an environment comprising a foreground and a horizon, de Maria has consciously created a tension between the abstract design and the viewer's automatic recognition of the all too familiar depiction of a landscape. In this way de Maria visually invokes an appreciation of his childhood homeland with all the freshness and youthful energy of a child's vision.