Allegoria della luce e dell'ombra2009

A journey into light and color through the layering of archetypal memories, belonging to the Sicilian-Greek world of the author ( a statue of Proserpina on which shadows, water and mists pass, clocks and still life of skulls as allegories of the fragility of Time, the sudden emergence of chthonic divinities from a world of primordial darkness...), mixed with memories and personal, autobiographical places, relived through the filter of myth.

The film is built according to a complex score that has, at the base, a pictorial and photographic work, painted tables, graphic series and photographs. Filming then becomes “painting with light”, cutting out ghostly apparitions, faces, fragments of bodies emerging from the night of the unconscious in the dark. Broken torsos, bodies wounded by the light, splintered, lapped and streaked by a watery light, as if they emerged from a mythical wash.

Allegory of light and shadow is a silent movie composed like a visual score to highlight the silent music of the images: "music for the eyes", as the historical avant-gardes intended. Visual symphony of images that takes the discourse on temporality to its extreme consequences: developing the formalist theories of Ejzenstejn, the sequence is constructed as a "graphic strip" resulting from the combination of nuclei of frames which, binding together on the basis of analogical, chromatic or semantic criteria, they give rise to contrapuntal fabrics of images.

“ Over the years Mazzoleni has explored the nature and expansion potential of the cinematographic language, moving in a direction of total art and creating a multidisciplinary work where the various languages ​​interpenetrate each other.

His filmic experimentation, which also investigates theoretical aspects, concerns both visual language and narrative forms and structures: from the "filmic poem" to the dream film, to the trance-film. Mazzoleni experiments on the composition of the image, full of references to the history of art, on color, on unusual narrative canons, using the visual interior monologue, the stylistic subjective: a cinema of visions, dreams and hallucinations, orchestrated by a type of montage musical. His cinema on film (shot with experimental techniques, mixing live sequences, direct painting on film, animated compositions and pixillation: that is, shooting real characters with stop-motion) move from the need to articulate the figurative space of the frame in a movement that expands the limits of the traditional painting, focusing on chromatic research and dizzying variations in the rhythms of the montage. The sequences are often constructed, like musical "compositions", with combinations of single frames, variously intertwined and interspersed with recurring visual leitmotifs."

( From the press release of the exhibition “Bodies and worlds in vertigo: Films and Poems by Arcangelo Mazzoleni - Settanta / Ottanta”, Rome, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GNAM), February 2018 )