Walter Morselli
Written between 1968 and 1970
I believe that the time has come to bring out of the unjust oblivion, which for so long has submerged him in the shadows, the name and work of the painter Walter Morselli. A silence that I am delighted to break and that will allow critics a greater deepening of his “process” as a painter.
Morselli, a solitary man, a very personal artist, needed to seclude himself, to work in an old cellar that has light from a small, low window, to give vent to his chromatic poetry, away from the schifiltosi noses of certain critics and the caustic comments of certain painters.
He worked hard then appeared in the limelight greeted by the applause of those who had not forgotten him.
It is not difficult to talk about his painting always ready to grasp feelings in secret relation to things; it is a loving adhesion; it is the brushstroke made harmony.
Morselli does not rage against the experimentalisms of the moment, he does not judge but listens more than anything else to himself, questions his own self, and introduces a more subtle and throbbing human breath, establishes a more intimate contact with the subject, scrutinizes it with mediated sympathy.
And he follows his well-defined poetics while maintaining the forms of his figurative language.
The material is apparently dismissed, in discreet tones, without ever giving in to the flattery of a color intended for itself.
The contact of light with things, which are of interest above all for the quality of their surfaces, creates a world crossed by subtle vibrations, tremors, chills and therefore full of corrugations imbued with an uncommon pictorial and human sensitivity.
And on things the light clumps, stagnates almost listening, in muted but evident accents that penetrate the matter.
His nature, after the long, voluntary silence, manifested itself better, more insinuating and affectionate than imperious, in nudes and portraits; full of feelings and emotions that the pictorial discourse holds up well.
The unpublished glimpses of alpine villages, the compositions of scrupulously exact still life without being realistically perfect, the portraits and nudes studied with that painful participation that finds its vital poetic center in that agreement, always happily pursued, between a lucid intellectual vision, a clearly systematic will and a lyrical transfiguration and finally the grazing cows, in the enchantment of an ordinary day and hour, they make Morselli the painter who has been able to find a perfect agreement between the visual impression of things and the violent emotion that they arouse in his heart.
His mature language, made of extraordinary drawing and color skills, is sentimentally veiled often with melancholy but it is also a joy of life, and warm and sunny light that discovers and revives the old plaster of the alley, which embellishes the old copper of the amphora, which caresses the bodies and faces, which immerses the pastures in an unreal dust.
From his secluded and proud solitude Walter Morselli has returned full of notes to demonstrate with what profound novelty a modern can interpret the suggestions of the masters of the past.