“it is true that just as poets still describe the outside,
so artists show the inside, that is, the affections, as much as they can.”
Benedetto Varchi, 1547
The sober and elegant "a lapis" chromatic strokes of Massimo Turlinelli are imbued with poetry, melodies and vibrant musicality in a balanced coexistence. The achievement of a rhythmic stylistic perfection, combined with an alternation of abstract-figurative forms, unlimited and volumetric spaces and marble colors reflects the mature awareness of the intrinsic value inseparable from each of his works. No dissonance surfaces in his compositions. In his pictorial film Turlinelli articulates the secrets of interiority. In fact, if it is inevitable to be enchanted by the perfection of the technique, even more so does the mystery of the invisible inherent in his works dominate, so much so that in Tulinelli, Paul Klee would say, the line no longer imitates the visible, but "makes visible''. An essential aspect, in his Platonic opinion, of creativity and art is the ability to make the invisible visible, that is, the ability to explore that part of reality to which ordinary consciousness and the spirit of the time are blind. A line from which you can cross submerged worlds and arrive at sublime affects such as the fullness of the senses, balance, the gravity of being and the weight of existing. He knows how to describe the simple compositional taste for beauty and the spasmodic love for details and chromatic nuances almost touching on the surreal, giving our gaze the attention towards talent, sacrifice and skill. In this direction, Turlinelli can only be a craftsman of Being and Existence, convinced that truth is the highest form of artistic expression and resides in the detail, figurative narration of feelings and therefore of life. His art is a speaking painting and painting is a "silent" poetry, a creative energy, an experience with the beauty of colors that can become a collective truth. A silent eloquence grafted into the bowels of the pictorial tradition which with the ancient and wise use of the pencil challenges time, which, if in some ways, as Ascanio Condivisi would say, consumes everything, in others, however, cannot destroy the beauty of true as long as, on the face of the earth, there are artists willing to duel with Nature in becoming creators to encourage reflection. Turlinelli belongs to the category of timeless Art: only those who deeply know its limits and its existence can achieve similar pictorial consciences. Of his art you can feel the flavour, the enchanting and enveloping smell released by Nature. It is in this composed compositional silence that man rediscovers himself, he finds that hidden detail which is the essence of his existence in the world of Art.
Poetry, Art and Soul become in Turlinelli the same narrative expression of "Horatian memory" and the artist becomes a docile instrument, after a long and careful intervention on the pictorial support with his hand, and even before that with the energy of creative voluptuousness, at the end of everything, having put down the pencil, he stops in front of the work and recognizes himself, or rather identifies a detail of his own existence and hands it over to history and to those who stop to admire, aware that everyone will be able to recognize their own intimate detail. A profound scholar of matter and its complex combinations, Turlinelli manages to mysteriously bring out even the living essence. He explores the abyss of his inner world and interprets reality beyond the narrow limits of ordinary consciousness, the spirit of the time and logical-analytical knowledge. The perfection and wisdom of his art translate into the composition of combinations of pencil polychromes so solid as to seem hyperreal, a technical aspect and essential element to question the nature of reality. For the artist, the observation of the external world is the stimulus that starts the journey into the depths of the psyche in which to find the meaning, the "hyperuranic" idea which will then collapse into the reality of the "drawn" work of art. The true artist must have the great ability to draw on the depths of the unconscious to find and realize the deepest universal meanings in Art for the benefit of all humanity. This is why Plato says that knowing is actually ''re-knowing''. For Turlinelli the path of revelation, illumination and compositional spaces is the fundamental objective of philosophy and religion in their highest expression, free from the distortions of the ego, from dogmas and from the power to contemplate Nature and understand it. Massimo Turlinelli is therefore a man who reveals his Renaissance nature as an artist, philosopher and poet, a lover of inseparable disciplines, with the sensitivity and ability to manage a single luminous mind that represents the world in all its aspects, becoming its microcosm. Its stylistic theme appears repetitive upon a superficial examination of the "lapis" marble components, but this does not represent a limit, as they are common stylistic elements: each subject expresses something different from the others which makes it unique, where the representation of the perfection of color rendering is necessarily a long journey of research and arrival: perfection of the representation of Nature and Reality beyond the ordinary senses and not just technical-formal perfection. In Turlinelli a physiological intentional introspective activity predominates with which he acquires greater control over his own mind to achieve a plastic imagination and composition. Two critically important structural elements of Turlinelli's style are light and background. The first makes his conventionally linear and volumetric Natures particularly alive, making them shine with their own light, with a new existence in a non-ordinary dimension. The second has a fundamental role in placing the subject in the foreground, decomposing it into its delicate polychromatic essences, with its brightness which no longer appears natural, but acquires infinite tones which could be defined as transcendent. The process of viewing Turlinelli's works is hypnotic - meditative due to the focus on the object to be reinterpreted and the vanishing of the ordinary world in which it is immersed, making it possible to appreciate its Nature, attempting to grasp its poetic essence, in this sort of absolute foreground that eliminates every distraction and every other object of ordinary reality.
In front of his works, time seems to stop to contemplate the theme immortalized on the pictorial support, which, while remaining what we already think we know, becomes entirely new in its timeless essence. His artistic technique manages to favor, with musicality and poeticity, the opening of the rooms of the human mind. In his extemporaneous visions, his Nature interpreted and "drawn" emerges dream and reality at the opposite extremes of imagination and materialism. Inspiration, reflection, reasoning, search for a lively and participatory, reciprocated dialogue, of colors and projections, of shapes and figures, reflect all the manual genius, poetry, passion and courage of Turlinelli to measure himself, to understand, to confront himself by digging inexorably into the his profound introspection. He speaks with sweet and subtle colors, at the same time determined, bold and vigorous, releasing that determination of freedom of his ego. His polychromatic symphonies embrace the magic and suggestion of an artistic maturity aware of knowing how to grasp the essence of beauty. Turlinelli's Nature strikes in its visual and emotional immediacy: vivid, spiritual and ethereal colours, refined and overlapping perspectives, refined luminous reflections, balanced compositional rendering inserted between shapes and colours. A mix of intuitions, sensations, techniques, themes and architectures of different linguistic materials. Each of his clear, clean, precise signs becomes words, thoughts, communication in a sweet suspended atmosphere. It is a pulsating engine of a representation of a work in which immeasurable perspectives, vital and realistic colors, crystalline rendering of the stylistic detail and the powerful plasticism become the mirror in which the interpretative inspiration and artistic talent of the aesthetic work is reflected by Massimo Turlinelli. A harmonic perfection that leads to the ecstasy of the observer: perfection of notes and rhythmic pauses of colors. A harmony always associated with human feelings, enhancing expressions and perceptions. Vibrant colors, enveloped in a dazzling, real light that affects the textures of the canvas, creating suspended settings, expressed by sober and elegant lines. The infinite instant is the enchantment of his artistic poetry. The energy of the gesture and of the color flows and vibrates in a reflection on light, colour, spaces, perspectives, shapes: a perfect harmony of his art, a symbolic silence, which the artist rediscovers in himself every time he lends himself to his creation. The originality and uniqueness of Turlinelli, in the context of living contemporary national and international artists, is represented by the peculiarity of his pictorial technique, followed and practiced by few: the light and uniform pressure on the pictorial support of colored pencils. A circular, oblique, diagonal, filling hatch: small movements that create nuances with an overlap of tones and homogeneous and non-homogeneous areas of colour, until the intensity of the color itself is gradually increased by superimposing thin layers of graphite.