The paintings and watercolors - in short, that entire body of work that feverishly captures the time of Anna Maria Malò - would not be explainable if the vivacity and especially the cultural delicacy which this painter shows in every attitude and expression of her life were not made real.
She has always painted flowery landscapes, a whole natural world lived and at the same time loved, before being translated into colored signs and splashes. A genre painter, as we would say in technical jargon, where genre is understood as flowers, or we should say more simply a painter of flowers.
She draws and paints hundreds and hundreds of them, all traced with the elegant technique of the watercolor. Anna Maria Malò depicts a veritable sophisticated herbarium, an intricate paradise of flowers, roses, iris, carnations, birds of paradise, gladioli, anemones, and so on, a world that only in Flemish and Romantic times found true, refined, extraordinary, imaginative. emulators. Soft, delicate, extremely light, opalescent colors, capable of revealing the delicacy and freshness these flowers demonstrate for a few hours, all rendered in shades of pink, red, green and yellow. Interesting are the flowers represented as still lives, or painted in glass vases, snatched away from a corner of the home to be set upon a white page, ready to leave delicate poetry to the vision of the most refined thoughts.
The topic of light in these painted flowers is truly unique; it embodies the transparency and reveals the bravura with which the painter has calibrated the pearlescence of the leaves and petals, the plastic vision of the ensemble of cut green. No less beautiful are her landscapes absorbed in fleeting weekend jaunts, Lombard and Veneto landscapes, Tuscan landscapes, Nordic landscapes, landscapes that seize earth and sky and project the infinite, that imaginary line that leads us, like Leopardi, to wander far, to be read as a substantial reference.
The landscapes on canvas, painted in oils, have a more accentuated, stronger, more amalgamated matter, and the colors are less juicy, more timbered, including certain sunny shades. These painted landscapes, like the flowers on paper, show a variation in absorption, just as paper as a material seems to have, with all the results and effects that we described earlier. In some respects it seemed easy to me to signify and place Anna Maria Malò’s flowers with certain flowers painted by the great artist De Pisis, with the ability to signify the immediacy of their portrait, for the ability almost to sharpen splotches, to barely give their characteristics, almost without violating the beauty of the bodies, the stems and leaves, the buds of the flowers represented. Shadings of delicate poetry underscore each body, and in this there is still the unpolluted breath of Nature, of the vital fluid that beats within like blood, reinvigorating every part.
These paintings by the Milanese painter Anna Maria Malò are truly beautiful and meaningful, extremely delicate; in the near future, in special city shows mainly in Italy but also abroad, people will be able to appreciate this long and vital research conducted with true mastery. The inviting opening to the schools of the 1900’s, and the comparison with masters of the time, have contributed to giving this pictorial operation a unique and secure voice, in which the meeting and union of the arts, like poetry and painting, have enlivened these choices over time.
One of these artistic voices is Anna Maria Malò, whom people will still talk about in the future for the beautiful earthly paradise painted in all its detail.