When in 2010, in the midst of the maturity of a thirty-year artistic experience, among the canvases with which he cohabits in his apartment in Monza, Luca Melzi begins the drafting of what he likes to define "ink whims", he already has a clear push underlying its creation: the need to reach the essence, understood as the primordial expression of the intimate. Art is the recovery of a feeling, whether it is meant for verba or for imagines. The suggestion that animates La calla (petals of words), the second collection of the artist from Monza, is whispered by the chromaticism that is the salt of every memory. His intimate poetry, blossomed in an abandonment, now ascetic, now mystical, lives on a sensism aimed at the search for "eternal beauty", hidden among the cross-sections of everyday life.
As for the previous collection, the colors of poetry (2017), painting and writing interpenetrate, manifesting the mutual presence of one another. In a chiaroscuro trend, between the triumph of light and the onset of darkness, the ordinary experiences a perpetual metamorphosis that the witness observes in the confusion of human and natural dimensions. Personification becomes a key expedient to restore the image of a lively reality enlivened by the eye of the observer. Through the predominant monological trend, the poet claims for himself a free space of creation. The ego desires the refuge of his atelier, intoxicated by the sequences of visions harnessed in the nominal statement, in a poetic network that weaves restlessness and quiet.
The corporal dimension is expressed in a low voice in a universe pervaded by the atavistic secret of the budding of the flower, a symbol at the same time of purity and precariousness. To his mystery, the poet abandons himself ecstatic and suffering, in love with this image of perfection, and aware of his fatal delicacy. The predominant solitude is followed by the melancholy tension aimed at a maternal figure, transfigured into the dream reality of a poem of the ideal, but at the same time physically pulsing in the images of a radiant and benevolent nature. The calla, bright and with a fundamental symbolic bearing, is the spokesperson for the passion that has always accompanied Luca Melzi's artistic production. The artist names the latest flower collection par excellence, virgin in the whiteness of its large, enveloping and protective petal. Melzi recognizes him, observing a photograph of the mother, in the tuft of hair that falls broadly on her forehead.
If the word tends to a progressive essentiality, assuming the immediacy of the image and freeing itself from a decadent instinct, the image is twisted, peeled into multiform fragments, now between violent colors and bold contours, in which ambiguity and opulence are condensed , indulging yearnings of decay, now in delicate and impressionist shades, in the indefinite sweetness of the memory they evoke. The poetic path of Luca Melzi lives a growth for which the word first follows the material trend of the painting, in its irregular angularity, and then assumes an elative pose, bringing to completion the arduous search for the essence, and becoming the bearer of a saving instance of possibility.
Carolina Borrelli