Massimo Villa was born in 1974 in Varese where he lives and works. After his Natural Sciences degree from the State University in Milan, his relationship with the landscape continued, examining it with a naturalist’s sensitivity and an artist’s eye. Working with oil on canvas, periods of work started that were dedicated to Lake Varese and the Brabbia marshes and the mountains and woods in Varese Province. In 2008, he began painting his first still lifes.

Massimo Villa’s research has, from the very start, been characterised by tenacious patience in acquiring the image, stroke after stroke, line after line. Slowly, precisely, devotedly. Self-taught and with a private talent, he made a name for himself as an artist of uncontaminated landscapes, sometimes wild and immersed in calm tranquillity. “Windows that look out on a calming beauty that takes your breath away”, the artist calls them. For him, the nature of the lake and the hills in the province have no secrets. For years, he walked around woods, marshes and reed-beds with his camera always at hand, ready to capture those elements of the landscape that appeared to him from time to time. Then, in his studio, he began his patient, analytical work, thoroughly and with obsessive attention to detail, in his attempt to achieve the perfect image. Thus was created a series of paintings that capture the consistent changes in the light during different parts of the day and in the various seasons, where green and light blue appear as an endless multitude of shades, reflections and tones.
The meticulous work on the image is also a characteristic of his most recent still lifes, which are painted with the virtuosity of an illusionist and pin-point precision. There is an attentive love that is present in the way that Massimo Villa observes and lightly touches the subjects that later he depicts on canvas. Never chosen at random, the protagonists that he places on his stage are patiently sought out at the market: “Often, those with the most personality are those fruits that have flaws or an irregular shape”, he says. In the silence of his studio, he sets out the scene to be painted on his table. It is the most delicate moment. He lays out the fruit beneath the beam of the lamp, he arranges them then re-arranges them to obtain his well-thought out design. Where everything is needed and nothing is random. He moves silently, almost unnoticeably, in his quest for the perfect viewpoint from which to paint the scene he has in mind. After the final touches, he sets up the tripod and takes a snap. The photo provides a lead that the artist will follow faithfully. Every detail of the peel is painted by an expert and tireless hand, every vein of a leaf is reproduced just one step short of hyperrealism, every single irregularity that makes a piece of fruit unique is depicted with the virtuoso precision of a 17th-century artist and, at the same time, with the austerity of a conceptual artist in a curious game of opposites and contrasts. Caravaggio-style compositions with sensual apples that are caressed as far as their dimples, bunches of grapes crowned with dry leaves. Citron fruit with botchy peel that invite you to dig your teeth into them. Cherries so juicy you can almost taste them. But the real star of the show is the smooth, cold surface of the white ceramic that contrasts with the brightly coloured fruit. It is that which, inevitably, grabs your attention, stealing it from everything else, made vivid by shade and reflections to be discovered with your eyes almost glued to the painting.
The initial inspiration for Massimo Villa’s painting is his love of Beauty. “All of my works,” he says ,”derive from aesthetic research. However, subsequently I notice with astonishment how they often mirror my life faithfully and how they fatally reflect my personal experiences.” As was the case of Giorgio Morandi’s poetic paintings: putting a row of bottles on a table, he was able to communicate his inner world. From his search for structured beauty, which is made up of a delicate balance between light and shade, objects and colours, tiny monuments, apparently detached from time and personal experience, emerge. “But as soon as I feel I have managed to put, on the canvas, a composition which can distract me, with its beauty, from my thoughts and daily concerns, unexpectedly, the way I have laid out the objects brings to mind situations that affect me.” So from a formal point of view, a hazelnut that has fallen from the bowl might have the role of giving the composition balance, but the title of the painting suggests a very different interpretation: “There just isn’t a place for me here.” It is often the paintings’ titles that highlight the connection with reality: an egg-box full of broken eggs is “Family Disaster,” a pile of oranges balancing precariously one on top of another is a “Family Burden,” which is difficult to carry. If, therefore, the ancient classical still life lesson such as “memento mori,” as a symbol of the perishability of material things, is far from Villa’s light-filled painting, sometimes his clear vision is cracked by a sense of immanent drama. His paintings communicate unexpected couplings, unsuspected relationships and secret alchemies that reinvigorate every thing in the composition, by giving them a slight quiver and hidden emotions. The fruit throbs with latent vitality, and the magic, inescapable light that bathes the scene contributes to orchestrating an atmosphere of fatal suspence and  magnetic, irresistible enchantment. Painted with impeccable accuracy, Massimo Villa’s still lifes are to be sipped slowly, to be explored detail by detail, so as to bring out the typical, stimulating characteristics.

Licia Spagnesi