‘Art disgusts me after midnight’: so says one of his ‘hammered words’, paradoxical and metaphorical manifestos, with which Marcello Maloberti has imposed his unmistakable calligraphy in the imagination of art: «Moreover, my name in Latin really means hammer», he is keen to point out.
White sheets where writes with a black marker poems, nursery rhymes, dirges, sentences that seem like those of a child who does not think about the consequences or the truth and is moved only byinstinct: ‘then it passes’, ‘flesh or heart’, ‘ass or culture’, ‘it tastes like the sea and my aunt’, ‘I’m obsessed with a bomb’. The meaning? There isn’t. On the other hand, the only understandable thing that artists say is that art does not give answers, but poses requests. And if art disgusts him after midnight it’s because Maloberti has the defenseless and refined air of a Contemporary Cinderellawho knows how to escape at the right moment because an artist cannot be caught.
Born in 1966, he grew up in Casalpusterlengo with his mother and grandmother: «I left home very late, at 35», he tells us, «I wasn’t a mama’s boy, but certainly a grandpa». He lives in Milan in his home new home-studio more or less for a year: «I have a lot of things in pairs: two chairs, two pen holders, two plants. I’m a bit double too, I’m full of contradictions». Even light runs on two tracks: «He made them, based on my project, NeonLauro. They are the ones who they make Kossuth’s works. I like them very much.
Once I didn’t care about design, now I’m passionate about it and for this new house I bought a lot of things that give me great satisfaction. But I can’t take the credit myself: the renovation was carried out by the architect Luciano GiorgiWhile Francesca Grossiwho works with me, helped and forced me to give me a move. I’m slow.” In fact, he seems a little nervous when he talks about Metal Panic curated by Diego Sileo, the largest retrospective ever dedicated to his work which will open at the PAC at the end of November and that in the courtyard you will see a new installation with a long mechanical arm at the top of which is the word ‘sky’ (in neon), but upside down. And that beautiful song by Roberto Vecchioni comes to mind which is precisely titled The Upside Down Sky and he says that ‘men are like the sea, the upside-down blue that reflects the sky, and they dream of sailing’. He invites us to enter his world a little like this, Maloberti. Looking at everything from one sideanother perspectivefrom a point of view equal and contrary to our comfort zone, like Piero Manzoni who with his Base of the Worldan upside down base on the ground, told us that this was the pedestal on which the world rested.
It will be an important event for art, because Maloberti is one of the most significant Italian artists of the moment and his career speaks for him: he participated in the Venice Biennale and that of Bangkok, at Manifesta, at the Rome Quadrennial, at the Milan Triennale, as well as having been exhibited in important museums around the world. He moves around a lot and this house seems designed for it too change. In addition to design and books, there are only works by him, multiplied by mirrors which seem to double the environment.
Above the desk a writing says ‘My work was born from fear’: «When I was five years old I lived in a working-class neighborhood and, while I was in the courtyard, I saw a toy fall from the fourth floor. I immediately fell in love with that object and just as I was in the dimension of dream, of fantasy, I felt a very strong slap coming from behind. It was the mother of the little girl who had dropped the toy. For me it was a very violent trauma. I stopped talking for a while.” You can see that some of that pain, that fear, has remained.
Perhaps this also contributed to making Maloberti a resolved man and a successful artist. This house demonstrates it, designed to host people, with a living room that resembles an agora where we can discuss art and life. Not too crowded with things, because he takes care of filling it, with one of the laughter loudest I have heard in my life.
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