Stefano Maestrini, self-taught painter, has been working for decades experimenting with different techniques and ways. As he himself communicates, his basic artistic training begins with attendance at museums in European cities that he has had the opportunity to visit thanks to the possibility of traveling in Italy and abroad, where he has stayed in various countries, such as England , Spain, France and Holland. After some advanced courses at the "Painters of the Navigli" in Milan, he attended a course in decoration and "trompe l'oeil" held by the Ente Scuola Edile Milanese. Having reached maturity, he moved to a country house, creating his atelier-studio, with the possibility of fully dedicating himself to his passion. He spends many of his pictorial days "en plein air" in the Vigezzo valley, the valley of painters, dedicating himself in particular to watercolors. Over the years, he has moved from figurative painting, both in oil and watercolor, to abstract. In recent times, his research has increasingly turned to the informal, to the investigation of the expressive possibilities of color, with a simplification brought to the essence. The colors are assumed by him as gestural energy, vibration, symbol of universal forces, up to a path that has brought him closer to the Zen painting of this latest production, ink on paper in the Japanese style.
An artistic creation, this one, which starts from the enso, i.e. from a black circle that symbolizes illumination, strength, the universe. black, but sometimes even blue and infiltration of some other color, a sort of personal inner diary. All with free but sure gestures, which do not allow for second thoughts, where any explosions of drippings or vibrating and rarefied streaks, without depth of color, indeed barely perceptible as smears of ink, have transformative movements, but belonging to the movement of that precise instant. This is how the multiple interpretations of the images are born: in Japanese enso (circle), it is often connected to the meditative experience of Zen Buddhist monks which ended up becoming the simplest and most direct way to express the ideal of absolute perfection.
Without wanting to enter into these forms of absolute spirituality, which can also include common meanings, such as that of fully living every moment of our lives, in my opinion, this research by Maestrini contains a great technical ability that allows him to make what for antonomasia is the denial of light. In this, one could see the oriental influence as a call to escape from the logic of a society devoted too much to material things and which often neglects those feelings that art can grant. Surely it is only a passage of the author through this type of art, since he always tends to paint renewed emotions and these creations will certainly provide him with the right stimuli to continue further, because Stefano Maestrini is above all a witness of authenticity and freedom in contemporary art.

Joseph May