in “Nuova Mutina” March 4, 1983
The posthumous exhibition by Walter Morselli (sixty-four oils, tempera, etchings and watercolors), set up with affectionate and devoted care at the Study Center “L. A. Muratori”, re-proposed to friends and admirers the thirty-year work of a Modenese artist who never ceases to regret, and -with the work- the figure and the person himself of Morselli, so much his painting was closely linked to his existence, which conditioned and illuminated at the same time, joy and torment, as are the exclusive and dominant passions.
Morselli’s art was dedication to nature and life, fidelity to reality, according to the example and teaching of illustrious masters of the Modena tradition and mainly of Ubaldo Magnavacca see the emblematic work “In studio with the master Magnavacca” of 1965, with which he had in common – although on less sumptuous and dazzling tones, more sober and intimate – the love for the solemn and severe scenarios of the countryside, and especially of the campaign “of works and days” with the figures, find hesiod and Virgilian of the peasants and working animals, visions of pantheistic serenity, capable of giving, in addition to aesthetic gratification, a moment at least of inner peace, a brief pause in the perpetual cyclone of existence,
But Morselli’s coherent and passionate discipline in the study and longing for nature had also led him beyond these goals, towards an investigation of the human figure that had characteristics of clinical analysis and at the same time of suffering human participation.
It is a line that reaches its culminating point in the portrait of “Nicola” (1952) a homeless man from Padua; a work that appears, after some time, as a revealing flash, a dazzling illumination, and in which those who – like the writer – have known both Morselli and Nicola, find one of the rare opportunities for predestined encounter of life and art.