Magnani is intrinsically too tied to the concepts of harmony and equilibrium to ever abandon himself to the dreamlike and elusive atmosphere of that movement. And then, that African mask…? Underneath, like a dull sound, here we also hear the voice of Picasso, and his passion for primitive art which brings him straight to those Demoiselles d’Avignon that overturn the work’s concept, open the space and invent Cubism. African masks and Venice Carnival masks alternate in these works in a layering of meaning that always goes deeper, always a step above that which we thought we had understood. Because the mask isn’t just an empty object used to contain a face, but is also and above all a second face. A face that hides our most intimate essence but in some ways, paradoxically, also reveals it, giving us the possibility - in disguise - to dare what we have never dared, to be what are we really are deep down. Here unfolds the seductive game of a painter capable of revealing layer after layer beneath the beauty, beneath the perfection, abysses of meaning. The legibility of the figuration - once again - interweaves itself with the fascination of rethought and tamed conceptual art, as only true contemporary art can do. And at the centre of everything, absolute king, is the object. That object which Picasso wanted to disrupt and from which Surrealism sought hidden meanings; the object that Andy Warhol tore from a supermarket shelf and that abstract expressionism destroyed in chaos. The object which man, in every culture, has clothed in power and that today, more than ever, is the fulcrum of our life. From that of the collector, refined viewer of the most precious objects in the world, to that of the serial accumulator, who cannot live without objects, but ends up suffocating among them.
ALESSANDRA REDAELLI