a little joy Print

Massimo Villa was born in 1974 in Varese where he lives and works. After his Natural Sciences degree from the State University in Milan, his relationship with the landscape continued, examining it with a naturalist’s sensitivity and an artist’s eye. Working with oil on canvas, periods of work started that were dedicated to Lake Varese and woods in Varese Province. In 2008, he began painting his first still lifes. There is an attentive love that is present in the way that Massimo Villa observes and lightly touches the subjects he depicts on canvas. Every detail is painted by an expert and tireless hand, every vein of a leaf is reproduced just one step short of hyperrealism, every single irregularity that makes a piece of fruit unique is depicted with the virtuoso precision of a 17th-century artist and, at the same time, with the austerity of a conceptual artist in a curious game of opposites and contrasts. From his search for structured beauty, which is made up of a delicate balance between light and shade, objects and colours, tiny monuments, apparently detached from time, emerge. The fruit throbs with latent vitality, and the magic, inescapable light that bathes the scene contributes to orchestrating an atmosphere of fatal suspence and magnetic, irresistible enchantment. Painted with impeccable accuracy, Massimo Villa’s still lifes are to be sipped slowly, to be explored detail by detail, so as to bring out the typical, stimulating characteristics. licia spagnesi