Conversation with Nicola Maggi

I don’t quite remember the exact year, but the place is firmly etched in my memory: an old farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside, just a few kilometers from where I was living at the time. It must have been around 1995; the Grunge era had just ended, I was starting my university studies, and in that house near a beech forest, one of my greatest loves was born: the work of the Austrian artist Hundertwasser, in particular one of his works from 1955: Ein Regentropfen, der in die Stadt fällt — A raindrop falling on the city. A dear friend, whom I haven’t seen in ages, introduced it to me while we were browsing through some art catalogs. I even remember using it for a young poetry collection I self-published.

Hundertwasser is not one of those artists who are widely studied at university, but his worldview, which even at 23 drove him to want to “free himself from the bluff of our civilization,” along with his ecological spirit and his focus on the awareness of identity that permeated his entire life and work captivated my twenty-year-old soul. Looking back at him today and rereading his interviews, I am still struck by how relevant he remains. In both his words and his works, one can find elements and concepts that today lie at the heart of artistic and political debates ranging from “happy degrowth” to sustainable development. All of this was realized through a close dialogue with the works of Egon Schiele, Walter Kampmann, as well as Paul Klee and Gustav Klimt. Equally strong in his influences are medieval art and painters from India, the East, Africa, as well as Indigenous and Maori artists.

From these premises arose a dreamlike world governed by its own laws that, at times, seems to brush against that of music, another great passion of mine since I was very young. That raindrop falling on a city, depicted from a bird’s-eye perspective, contained in embryo all of this. The ideographic vision, with Japanese influences, conveyed in this watercolor on crumpled brown paper prepared with carbon paper, would later develop into his architecture and many other projects, where the centrality of water as a natural, calming, and regulating element remains constant, just like time: it is its current that irresistibly drags us into ever-changing whirlpools of narratives that seem to compose themselves only to unravel and give rise to new stories.

At the time, I couldn’t have known it, but after 25 years I realize that the artists who move me the most share many traits in common with his work.