2025 Sorridi Faccia. Regno dei Fiori

Galleria Mazzoli is pleased to announce, forty years after the previous exhibition, 2025 Sorridi faccia by Nicola De Maria.
The show features a collection of works that demonstrate the expressive power of Regno dei Fiori.
The eye travels over the painted subjects with curiosity, which evoke sensations stirring emotions and unfolding narratives capable of resonating through time and space, in both the past and the future. A catalogue curated by Richard Milazzo will accompany the exhibition.
In his essay on Nicola De Maria’s practice Nicola De Maria: We Have Only To Shut Our Eyes To See the Light, and To Open Them To See the Darkness the critic states: “Time does not simply pass, it flees into an irreversible void, with no actual beginning or end. Hence, the beautiful and imaginary kingdom of Nicola De Maria’s paintings!”
“As such, it could be said all the heady movements of our time – Arte Povera, Transavantgarde, Minimalism, and even Conceptualism – configured themselves in a unique manner in the work of Nicola De Maria, such that he ultimately became, thankfully, exponents of none of these, at least not in any exclusive or unimaginative manner, particularly given the abstract or open-ended nature of his work.”
“Nicola De Maria once explained: ‘Art is born when a work is able to inspire a prayer. Painting is also a way of praying, because in the act itself there is self-denial, mercy and transcendence […] A work of art is such if it is useful to others, in the sense of bringing life, emotionally communicating what flows from the artist, even if it does not come from him, but from an otherness that has always been present in him […]’ More accurate words cannot be found to express the nature not only of Nicola De Maria’s work but all great Art. He goes on to say: ‘A work of art is such when, filtering the brutality, pain and sadness of the world, it increases our vitality, and becomes song and praise […] I feel like the instrument of a commitment called to increase harmony in the world, increasing its life. If I speak of harmony I’m referring to that which envelops the universe. We must welcome it, bearing witness to it through paintings, bringing it back to earth and embodying it in art.’
“And so, I have to believe whatever so-called Flowers obtain in the work, they also dream by night. What I adore about Nicola De Maria is not just his knowing-ways among the forms and colours, the blazing light, of the conscious world, but his untoward ways among the most wayward of shadows. What more can we ask of an artist than the transformation of the darkness into the light; but also the still more difficult transformation of the light into the darkness that prevails in the interior life of the soul. This, too, this esoteric skill, rare as it is among artists, is necessary if we are to traffic in the wayward worlds of the sublime.”
“While others argued for status and golden walls, Nicola De Maria embraced a corner of consciousness, a corner of the Night World, and transformed it into the precarious worlds drifting in and out of consciousness, in and out of the darkness and the light. The fundamentally tautological world of human and inhuman existence. Nicola De Maria is right: ‘I do not draw objects, but essences. Not things but their souls.’ But, I would argue also the very soul of things, for that is what we turn the soul we have rejected in our lives into – we turn it into a discarded thing. And there is nothing Nicola De Maria loves to paint more than discarded things: bandaged souls that have become, in our social media culture, white shrouds, ‘apparent awkwardnesses.’”
“But what lovely things these awkwardnesses, these awkward spaces and stars and flowers, are. These universes, these paintings and images and visions of the world, “without bombs.” Except that the bombs keep falling. Nicola De Maria’s work simply envisions a world in which the only thing that has been cut out or away is not the soul, not its essences, but the bombs.
The only explosions we will witness inside his paintings are the soul crying out.
“If Nicola De Maria’s paintings are about something else, then let’s find out what that something else is. I would venture a guess that that ‘something else’ is ‘everything else.’”