ART IN BLACK AND WHITE
by Carl Kamulski
President and Executive Director, Michigan Gallery, Detroit
German Expressionism brought back to art the ancient form of woodcut. The artists of “Die Brücke” who had witnessed at first hand the courage of the battlefields of France in World War I, and the shattered and corrupted society of postwar Germany, had visions of human disaster. The art of woodcut with its strong linear pattern and contrast of black and white was suitable for a subject matter of highly emotional character and transcendental overtones.
Carla Mazzucato was exposed in her early life to the feelings and the proletarian themes of most “Brücke” artists. She came to understand and love the images, drawn into religious subjects, with angular forms, arbitrary proportions and the planes of compressed space. In her woodcuts she makes use of the simplicity and primeval significance of the medium by adding narrative content.
Mazzucato
classic art — contemporary vision
Art Critique - Mazzucato: New Horizons (published U.S.A.) - 1994
“Silent Night” and both “Landscape of My Life 1” and “Landscape of My Life II” reflect a relationship between the artist and her environment. “Alpine Music”, “Tyrolean Dance” and “Harvest Time” have also feeling for rhythmic composition, symbolically uniting man and nature and sharing in the harmony of the universe.
In these woodcuts as in her paintings Mazzucato uses her art to give expression to happy experiences and to extract the emotional content from life, sharing the intensity of her feelings.
But the story of life can also be problematic and dramatic events occur every day in some parts of the world.
While Mazzucato celebrates life in her paintings of color and form, she uses woodcut to express the theme of human suffering: love and hate, life and death, pain and loneliness. In “Berlin 1989” and “Beijing 1989” the artist communicates the emotional tensions and conflicts of modern society. The pictorial result is based on her temperament and personal interpretation of the single event.
Alpine Music
Tyrolean Dance
Harvest Time
