Massimiliano Avesani's works immediately express the need for controlled figuration where the space of representation opens up to a meditation that becomes a metalinguistic reflection, a consideration of the vision itself, of the logic of representation.

In the first instance, it is the gaze as an act of affirmation and rebellion. 
Gaze that then, immediately, declines into sign. The relationship that the eye maintains with the gesture declines the meaning of painting and of continuing to do so in the age of technology, challenging progress and man. And confronting the emptiness of the canvas, with dismay yet with decision, reaffirming one's identity, one's presence in the portion of the world we inhabit and cultivate.
In this marking of the canvas - ploughing the ground almost, leaving footprints of his own path - Avesani chooses a deliberately selected palette, monk-like almost, as if granting few distractions. Or, better still, as if he were accepting a challenge of pure virtuosity, deciding to express himself - if the metaphor is permissible - not as an entire chromatic orchestra but with a single piano, albeit perfectly tuned.
And it is on these keys of infinite shades of greys and blacks and whites and very dense blues that a meditation takes place that cannot simply be called pictorial because other alphabets enter the field, drawing on that everyday life so invaded by images that it can no longer be imagined otherwise.
The composition allows a fragmentation with a cinematographic flavour to emerge. Stills from films never shot except in the mind, in dreams, in oblivion, the subjects emerge, allowing themselves temporal and thematic shifts like poetic licences from television zapping. Effective fragmentation that reflects our inevitable oscillation in a time that is, narratively speaking, cinematic.
The vision, the withheld frame, the condensed error, the instant in which everything can happen, the still, precisely. The mystery in synthesis. The moment from which there is no turning back and in which, in an almost erotic way, the brush seems to get lost.
It is an exercise, this, that goes beyond the gaze and thus embraces life, the sense of existing and happening, of our being human and therefore fallacious, of our passage, not always slight, often too complex. But always precious.

 

Sonia Borsato