"Geografia Sacra IV" Collage

Riccardo Mayr born 1970 in Ferrara (Italy) is a self-taught painter.From the very beginning during the nineties he focused his attention on unusual materials as: rust, charcoal, ash, lead, iron and mirror debris.The subjects of his paintings while remaining in the domain of classical painting as landscapes and portraits are primarily searching for reasons behind the pure act of painting and art performance, which has, in view of new technologies and their frequent use, become questionable.

Discipline of the matter

Today, talking about creativity is tricky. Creativity has become strongly tied to the economics of the art market. It has become increasingly difficult to separate the creative process from the economic web within which an artist functions. Yet an artist may seek to express himself by distancing himself from the virtual dynamics of the market.

For Riccardo Mayr, such a distancing process involves both an active pursuit of the physical essence of a subject as well as a rejection of its marginal or perhaps accidental attributes.

How can the essential qualities of a subject be isolated and digested through the creative process? How can its countless elements be identified and selected in order to reveal the core of the subject?

The creative act is not exclusively dictated by an artist's inner impulses but, rather, it must permit a responsiveness to an external physical logic. This process involves a shifting away from mechanical reproduction of standardized products (generally an unquestioned sign of "competence") towards a process that allows physical elements to mingle without restraint.

Eschewing the use of metaphors, Riccardo Mayr is in search of the meaning concealed within physical planes of consistency (Deleuze, Guattari). He pursues this meaning through active physical involvement in the creative process.

In focusing on physical nature, Mayr reasserts materialism as a means to reveal the essence of a subject. In this view, the material corresponds to the organic"”from electrons, to cellular matter, to physical structures.

These elements"”stripped of their synthetic layers, removed from their contexts and locations"”are free to coalesce in a silent dance in a new plane of consistency (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus). Neither the motion of this dance nor its result can be predicted or replicated.