Painting
Arturo Mazzola, an extraordinary figure among the artists of his generation, began his artistic journey in the 1940s with works that express a life marked and lived internally, with the "melancholy of his beloved Lombard landscapes, inspired by the Naviglio dock, the small stations of the Milanese hinterland, suburban circuses, motherhoods, and tired, silent women" (R. Margonari).
A student of Semeghini and Aldo Carpi, he absorbed and recognized as his own the spirit of noble independence and sense of nonconformity.
He frequented and lived in the Milanese artistic scene of the 1950s, was an attentive and participatory observer, yet meditative and preferred isolation, convinced that the aesthetic adventure must be experienced within oneself.
His paintings express wordless dialogues, the silence that accompanied him in daily life and that would lead him to achieve "resonances of spiritual freedom."
His independence, which placed him neither among the "figurative" nor among the "abstract" artists, prevented him from entering the sometimes overly facile art market of those years.
But this saved him from mannerisms and rhetoric.
His artistic career clearly echoes Klee and Licini, but it certainly does not exhaust his painting, made of symbols rendered with rare aesthetic finesse.
Guido Ballo, Raffaele De Grada, Gillo Dorfles, Renzo Margonari, and Mario De Micheli, among others, have written about him.