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Mario Stafforini was a child of the sixties
who would have been sure to wear some flowers in his hair
if he had been going to San Francisco.
But instead he was going to Ibiza and the
flowers would be in his visionary paintings.
He was born in 1942, in Mar de Plata, Argentina.
His first Art studies consisted of three
years in the workshop of Basilio Celestino, a painting master
who was following the line, as an old pupil, of Spilimbergo
and Gomez Cornet, two of the most solid leaders of the Argentinean
Figurative Painting School.
He left the figurative school in 1959, when
he discovered the Abstract Expressionist North-American School.
Mario became completely captivated by this style of art and
its message, especially of Jackson Pollock paintings, with
which he identified and started doing very big paintings,
dripping synthetic enamel on top of wild brushes, like whips
of pure colour.
Later on he experimented with different
combinations of materials in his new art works. Some of them
completely decomposed because of the organic material that
he was working with, but Mario was gaining in experience and
in the knowledge of new materials, always looking for better
transparencies, texture and determinate qualities.
From this experience his personal style
and improvised technique started to be developed. From these
times, we can see his mixed techniques, water-paintings, acrylics,
inks, oil, etc. But when he goes back to figurative painting,
he uses all this "informal" experience looking for
original qualities that - according to him - express the infinite
possibilities of the inter-relation of the different materials,
this time with the guarantee that the colours and the materials
will remain in the painting.
In 1960, Mario Stafforini and another three
friends created in the capital city of the Buenos Aires province,
La Plata, the Art Group "Si". Also in the same year,
he joins in the university, where he studies Architecture
until 1963, the year when he leaves the university and decides
to dedicate his life exclusively to art.
During the 1960s, the Group "Si"
was the most important group of artists in South America and
also the pioneers in this Continent of what was known as "Arte
Informalista" (Informal Art). Up to seventeen different
painters and sculptors formed part of this group having regular
exhibitions all over Argentina and other countries.
In 1963, they had an exhibition in the "Museo
de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires" in Argentina's Capital.
One of Mario's paintings was bought by the Museum and since
then, his paintings have graced the art treasures of the most
important art centre of the country, one of the best Art Collections
of the South American Continent.
From 1963 till 1969, Mario continued painting
and exhibiting in the best art galleries of the most important
Argentinean cities: "Lirolay Gallery", "Witcomb",
"El Laberinto", "Nueva Visión",
"Radio Universidad La Plata", "Ver y Estimar",
"Palacio de la Legislatura" and "Galería
del Mar" in Mar del Plata.
Also in 1969, the same year that men stepped
on the Moon, Mario took the trip of his own life. He put his
brushes in a small suitcase, picked up his guitar and jumped
on board the "Giulio Cesare", sailing to Europe.
His journey included France, Switzerland,
Italy and finally Spain. In Barcelona, where he lived for
a short time, he didn't do much painting, but stayed with
some friends, musicians who called themselves "La Peste
Jazz Band". He joined Nelson Gonzalez (clarinet), who
had already spent a winter in Ibiza, and Noberto Gandini,
(trumpet), playing his guitar and the banjo.
From Barcelona, Mario took the ferryboat
to look for the Sun and the legend of Ibiza. I will use his
own words to describe his first impressions of the Island
and "Dalt Vila" (the Old Eivissa Town, inside the
big walls):
"It was early in a winter morning,
the Sun just raising from the back, the boat coming in slowly
into the bay, the powerful "cliché" of the
Eivissa Acropolis claiming the sea-side cliffs...and the light
reflecting in the water, the light... the bright light."
"There were no doubts, this was the
place. This was my place!"
After saying this, Mario reads a paragraph
of a poem written by Antonio Colinas (*) "¿Cuanto
tiempo he buscado este sitio cercado por la luz?" (How
long have I looked for this place invested by the light?)
After disembarking, walking by the narrow
streets of "Sa Marina" and "Sa Peña"
wards, the small white geometric houses with narrow and stiff
upstairs, colourful balconies, old painted doors and tiny
windows, the old little shops, packed full of different objects,
such as sickles, tin funnels and other peasant tools, straw-hats
and bags, virgin untainted wool-jumpers and socks, strings
of dry peppers, garlic and "pabrasus" hanging in
the doors and the front-wall outside in the streets, the peaceful
and tranquil harmony of its inhabitants and the incredible
cosmopolitan crowds of the streets, terraces and markets of
the city, exchanging ideas with everybody in the exterior
Broadway of the World that Ibiza was at the time. He goes
back to these impressions and emotions in every new exhibition
and always some of his new paintings will remind us, with
some nostalgia, of these first impressions.
Mario was then 27, the world of the galleries
was out of place, and he was not thinking of painting for
exhibitions. He started to weave with a self-invented loom.
With this cloth, he used to make bags and simple costumes
that were sold in the streets and the hippie markets.
He moved to an old "casa payesa,"
"Can Coll de Dalt", out in the countryside. He was
living in this house for seven years, with his wife Beatriz
and their two little daughters, Dunia and Aixa, without electricity
or tap water, cooking with little branches and timber from
the forest near by, eating plenty of rice and little meat.
It was the years of Flower Power and Woodstock, of "Steppen
Wolf" and "Siddhartha," of Hermann Hesse, the
"The Third Eye" of Lomgsang Rampa, "The Naked
Ape" of Desmond Morris. It was the years of interior
searching, trying to reach the dream of living a natural and
complete free life, a simple and bucolic country-side-life,
surviving on his artisan works, self-made leather bags and
belts as well as the cloth.
Seven years later, the family moved back
to live in Ibiza Town when his third and only son, Joan, (John)
was born.
Mario returned to his painting with new
energies and enthusiasms and since then he hasn't stop painting
and exhibits every year in one or two of the best Art Galleries
of the Island.
All these years of living so close with
Nature can be seen as a reflex on his paintings: the plants,
especially the flower, becomes one of his best subjects. In
his first exhibition in Eivissa, its catalogue says:
"The first word is Flower, afterwards,
we make a Bough"
Mario looks in his paintings for a meeting-point
between the inside and the outside, the interior and the exterior,
the life-motive that communicates the two worlds. Now the
Flower is intermediary between the darkness of the soil, where
the plant sink its roots, the material world, and the clear
ethereal sunlight coming from the sky, that it gives its energy.
The Flower is the "door" that communicates its inner
energy with the exterior world, open to the wings of the messenger-angels,
the insects that will spread this energy, pollinating other
flowers in an eternal circle.
This attraction of Nature, especially for
the flowers and plants in general, is important in Mario's
life. He forms part of a group of botanicals that study and
catalogue the Flora of the Balearic Islands for the editing
of the "Nova Enciclopedia de las Illas Balears"
(The New Balearic Encyclopaedia). He is also one of the founders,
together with Nestor Torres, of the Saturday-afternoon-walks
group, almost twenty years ago.
This group walks to different and new places
every week, have given Stafforini a deep knowledge of the
entire Island, so his landscapes and marinas, even the ones
with the same repeated motives, all have different perspectives
and therefore, a different light. There is also an intellectual
perception in his art-works; we can see this in his landscapes
and marinas, subtle intentions in every landscape seem to
give the clue to find out the secrets within the paintings.
Here, the littoral, the coastline is the meeting-point of
the solid, the liquid and the ethereal world. The spectator
seems to form part of everything that appears in front of
him, as his own portrait inside the painting becomes a part
of it.
His paintings of the Ibicenco old doors,
with the big old locks, much sought after by the art collectors,
done with an extraordinary technique and superb colours on
artisan-hand-self-made paper, show us once again the duality
of his world. "The door is the intermediary in between
two worlds, its life-motive, the element that connects the
interior and the exterior, both are communicated. If we open
it, the house gets a new meaning and another element comes
into it, the communication."
And there again with his balconies. "A
balcony is not the house, either the street, it is the point
where both worlds meet."
Today, almost 32 years after his arrival,
Mario keeps looking for the essential of the Island, for its
Soul, trying to decipher its light. "This powerful and
metaphysic light that plays and rebounds on the white-wash
walls, illuminating the shadows with infinite tones of colours,
mixing them up like broken rainbows, which disappear as soon
as we look up to the sky, becoming all just pure bright light"
(*) Antonio Colinas, "Premio Nacional
de Poesia" (National Award of Poetry, one of the best
Spanish actual poets) is one of our most honourable guests,
one of the "Elephants" in the Mariano Planells book,
"La Senda de los Elefantes" a real Ibicenco by now
and by the heart, and one of Mario's personal friends.
José P Ribas
josepribas@liveibiza.com
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