Many people are curious about him, because he lives a simple life and is indifferent to fame and fortune, so he is called a monk painter; Because he has never left Bologna, he thinks his works are too regional and calls him a local painter. He keeps close contact with literary critics and writers. You don't often see his works, most of which are private collections. The best places to see his paintings are the Bella Art Museum in Milan and the Mo Landi Art Museum in his hometown of Bologna.
The most special and criticized point of Mo Landi is that his creative theme is limited to a few bottles and the scenery outside Bologna. These bottles can still be seen in his studio today. They are objects that can be seen at any time in daily life: kettles, water bottles, vases, oil drums, square boxes, round boxes or teapots, which are unremarkable; And the scenery in the painting, you can also find the road he walked one by one. All his life, he painted these bottles and the scenery in his living environment. There are 1264 oil paintings alone, which does not include sketches, watercolors, copperplate prints and other media.
Why only draw bottles? In an interview from 65438 to 0957, Mo Landi once mentioned: "The visible world, that is, the feeling and image aroused by the material world, is very difficult, and even can't be described by definition and words. In fact, it is completely different from what we feel in our daily life, because the world we see visually is determined by shape, color, space and light ... I believe that nothing is more abstract and unreal than the world we see. What we know in the material world is not what we see and understand. The quality of things certainly exists, but it doesn't have any meaning we give it. "
Mo Landi likes bottles, because he thinks that the simpler and more ordinary things are, the more they can be liberated from redundant interpretation. Therefore, by repeatedly arranging these simple bottles, he tried to overthrow the world we know through definition and return to the world of visual observation and pure form.
Look at his paintings carefully and see what defines space. Are they overlapping bottles? Is it their shadow? Or split the picture in two, suggesting that the upper color block is the wall and the lower color block is the desktop (straight line)? Mo Landi is challenging our concept of the material world. Did we really see a bottle? If it's a bottle, why isn't it textured? Why is the brush handwriting on the bottle so obvious? Would it be more appropriate to say that they are geometric figures? Is there any light in the picture? Is it because of the shadow? Or because of the color? Mo Landi's paintings are all platitudes-still life and scenery, but when you can't define them as bottles, should his paintings be regarded as modern or traditional?
Some people say that Mo Landi's paintings are static; Some people say that his bottle is whispering; Some people say that you can't help being quiet when you look at his paintings. It's color! If you have seen the murals of Ma Saqiao or Piero Della Francesco, you will understand where the colors in his paintings come from. Gray, grayish white, pink orange, grayish blue, khaki, each color seems to be painted on a wall with lime as the background color, permeated with grayish white tones, losing their original strong and dense colors, and blending with other colors softly and elegantly.
The quietness in the painting also comes from the horizontal arrangement of bottles, which allows our eyes to move slowly from left to right with the shape of bottles, without being disturbed by complex composition. Even if the bottle is placed vertically in the center of the picture, it achieves perfect visual balance because of the square canvas. 1964, Mo Landi completed the last oil painting of his life: oil drums, rectangular cans and spheres were arranged on the canvas as if they were close together, but the shadows of spheres and long cans quietly revealed the distance between them and their surroundings; The background in the picture is the same color as the conical oil tank on the left, and the left half of the ball is the same color as the table. Mo Landi deliberately arranged and colored these items, waiting for the right light, and left the final sketch for his bottle with trembling and quick strokes. Finally, the form and space of things merge together, and light, space, form and color become the most contradictory definitions. ...
1990 is the centenary birthday of giorgio morandi. In memory of this painter, the Bologna municipal government transformed the Palazzo d'Accurisio, where the municipal government was located for hundreds of years, into the Mo Landi Art Museum, in memory of this citizen painter who was born and died in Bologna. His ordinary life, like his paintings, quietly shows the most ordinary things and its most extraordinary concepts to the audience.