…Artist Mauro Guidotti was born in Rome in 1965. Since the early years of his life he was already devoted to art without being particularly affected by some state of restlessness. At 10 he experienced what the artist himself defines as the first relational impact with "another world". The return to his father’s birthplace (Capena, where he currently resides) marks the beginning of the first phase in which he experienced  "uprooting from the ego-syntonic",  in respect to the  “you” intended as symbolic immersion into another world. From this moment on,  his art took an expressive abstract-symbolic  path that aimed to penetrate  the dense forest of human relationships to experience the sense of lacerating mystery of a human dimension hurt by irrational interpersonal  intolerance. This critical moment assumed the inexplicable forms of an existential absurdity defined by him, quoting Kierkegaard, "deadly disease" or better the condition of a "dying the death", condition he lived quietly, meekly and "overwhelmingly", in a solitude whose size varied between the hypothesis of suicide and that of madness. In this second phase of his life he joined the 1st Art School of Rome where he gave form and expression to his innate artistic nature giving life to an automatic and a-intellectual  expressive dimension  that privileged deep states of  immediate information without filters, as they were simultaneous repercussions of dark impulses of the soul. Is in this state of life, intimately painful, ill and troubled, raw and distressing, that on a dark night the "cry" of faith rise as he prayed to the Divine Fatherhood. It released him from the weight of an absurd existence, an existence without a purpose and a goal. Thus began the third core of his earthly life, that of the reintegration of his human consciousness through the recovery of the image and likeness of God. It’s from here that Light unfolds, illuminating a new path of reconciled experience with the world that pushes the artist to offer his life in the name of a rediscovered love. In 1990 he  leaves  for Colombia to become  a missionary  where he lives in an international seminary trying to sift and discern a possible priestly vocation. These were the years in which his artistic-poetic world is spiritualized, actualizing in sacred portrayals that are expressed in murals of theological-symbolic accents. In 1996, after a deep human and spiritual encounter with Latin America where, among other things, he came to know the creations of Fernando Botero and Alejandro Obregón, his desire led him to interrupt his priestly training, harboring  however, feelings of deep gratitude for the love he received during those formative years. Back in Italy, he continued and completed his studies in philosophy and theology and now practices as a teacher of Religion, a role realizes with enthusiastic passion. After several years in Italy, he returned to Colombia and, revisited the steps of his mission.  He meets Erika, now his wife, from whom he receives inspiration for a richer, more mature and articulate pictorial consciousness defined by the artist himself "Fauvexpressurrealism". This style expresses the centripetal convergence of three synergistic ways of conceiving the creative experience and his inner world. This is the perspective in which Guidotti sees himself; he documents his dynamic and intense existential path which expresses the eternal human quest for meaning in the "meaning",  an immersion in a intra-worldly space, that is the immanence of the anthropological dimension lived and suffered. This path satisfies the deepest aspirations inscribed in the heart of every human being.  This perspective appears, therefore, in his pictorial dialogue, as something that amazes, surprises,  moves, but can also hurt, anguish, tear like real life, exposing humanity itself to the radical question, stated without filters, in the uninterrupted flow of  experience intended in its most pure and authentic form.

 

 

                                                                 Oberon Santafe (art critic, Painter and Poet Philosopher).