Mauro Betti
(Cascina 1951)

Mauro Betti was born in 1951 in Cascina (near Pisa). Here he attended the Istituto d’Arte (a secondary school specialised in art) and later obtained his diploma at Florence’s Accademia di Belle Arti (Fine Art University), where he still teaches. After an initial stage where he mostly worked on designing objects and furniture, since the early Eighties he has devoted all his energies to painting. At first he worked exclusively with pencil, pastels and wax crayons; he had an exhibition of that work in 1984 at Florence’s Galleria Il Ponte. He continued in the same vein almost all through the Eighties, then began tackling canvases, firstly with oils, then working more and more with synthetic enamels. During these years his work was made known to the public through four monographic catalogues at the Galleria Il Ponte. He took these to the Fairs at Bologna and Milan.

“Mauro Betti’s latest works represent the necessary landing-place [...] for the allusions of a symbolisation which does not refuse to be used to make playful incursions into reality. In fact, while the surface enjoys the drunken abandon of wide open backgrounds, interrupted here and there by the insertion of coloured wedges, on the space of the canvas we can see a few fragments of figures, crazy broken elements of a playful visual repertoire, where a running wild boar can give way to the recurring image of a chick, or of a star which seems to have fallen off a Christmas tree, rather than out of the sky.
There is nothing didactic, no attempt at a narrative to preside over these figures. They are incursions into the real world which are a playful affirmation of a freedom alluded to, of an expressive irony.  [...] 
The artist patiently constructs a stage onto which these figurative elements venture. The surface of the work is made up of overlapping fragments of canvas, which break up the uniformity of the background by isolating differently textured portions of it, run through with ripples and ridges where the pieces are joined together. The use of industrial enamels and especially of thick pasty glues emphasise the reliefs, which beyond the superficial monochrome, create a composite spatiality with geometric rhythms, on which Betti then intervenes by inserting coloured wedges. These act as rhythmic alterations of space or as an informal counterpoint to balance an invasion by the figurative element. The stratification of the level surface, a symbolic representation of duration, is accentuated by the frequent presence of graphic elements, letters and numbers which simulate an attempt at writing, the incomplete contact with a sign that is not yet the word. Or is no longer the word. The ineffability of these symbolic elements is linked to the mysterious fable-like tone of the titles. The immobile dreamer, Atakama, Ounara. Cryptic, ironic, persuasive lexical keys which are not enough to reveal the enigma that Betti’s canvases put forward.  [...]

(Taken from the text in the catalogue by Marina Pizziolo, Edizioni Il Ponte, Florence, 2002)