Ambrogio Magnaghi

"The paintings of Ambrogio Magnaghi don't depict a given reality so much as propose the visionary decor of yet another. They extend, thereby, our own field of perception, offering us glimpses as they do of a luminous - if remote - condition : landscapes bathing in the late light of the revelatory. As nostalgic as they are promissory, Magnaghi's paintings dont happen "here" so much as "there" : on the raised plain, that is, of a metaphysical perspective. By an ingenious redistribution of commonplace subject matter - be it naturel or manufactured - Magnaghi manages to set the stage for such a perspective. (...) we are continuously offered visions of the habituel but drawn out of all habituel context. As in Italian painting of the fourteenth century, Magnaghi's work celebrates the transcendent. One only need examine the paintings, say, of Simone Martini or Ambrogio Lorenzetti in which spiritual drama is depicted as much by the radiance they emit as by the narrative they describe to appreciate fully the influence that period exercised upon Magnaghi's imagination. Each of his paintings, like theirs, seems as if frozen in the lightning flash of anuminous vision. There, in the eternity of an instant, devoid of all shadow and exempt from all temporality, they generate a serenity of their own." (From Sobin' introductory essay)