Liana BORTOLON

She gives me the impression of constructing her images like and artisan, strokes of a chisel, and more still, like and inspired musician, who confides in the long vibration of violins.
Zoomed in such a way, so concise and stirring, her paintings seem to realize the harmonious union of all the arts.
To live with arts is also her condition for existing. Interesting anecdotes about her personality emerge from pages of Carola Mazot diary: "Sometimes" she writes "one happens to think how things would have been for us without some of the combinations of events wich occur in life. For example, in front of a painting, this misterious meeting, difficult to understand how it happens but without which I cannot imagine my existence, has an origin in the distant past....."
There has been nothing casual in her biography as an artist.
Today we talk a lot about archetypes. Archetypes may be her maternal grandfather, that Venetian painter of great talent, Vettore Zanetti Zilla, who took care of primary artistic education; her maternal grandmother who was the daughter of a famous Slovenier painter (Matschegs); her mother, who was also attracted by the art of painting and all those painters and musicians who have formed the atmosphere of her family.
Carola Mazot was born in Valdagno and at three ye ars of age she came to Milan and then was transferred to Venice as her mother wanted to return to her own native city.
When her grandfather died, Carola lost an important guide but, nevertheless, she had initiated her painting activity and is in that period, at the age of sixsteen, she became a student of the Frisia studio.
The young artist lucidly esteemed her masters." At the first it was interesting. Frisia eliminated my pencil preparation, making me design by painting. His preparation was, above all, technical and based on capacity; he made me copy from subjects which he prepared himself still life, portraits of ladies. I still remember with hate a bag of roasted chestnuts spilt on a table about which I didn't care a fig!......Her luck changed when she meets Lorenzo Pepe, the sculptor, who made her study drawing again as a preparation to enter the Brera Accademy. Pepe taught me to work without ever losing sight of whole form. While sketching, I had to immediately design the big geometric mass in which the figure was included and also while finishing the details I was not to lose sight of the from in its full integrity. I thus discovered the harmony and bond of the various points between each other of the reality which I copied and from which a mystery emerged, a fascination which alwais accompanied me..."
The figure was and is the centre of every interest of hers, at first discovered, studied and loved on the model itself, then rediscovered by the memory of a movement, a line of a face or by the grace of a hand.
Every one of these details may become the focal point of her compositions and at times emerge and subordinate every other element. Her nostalgic models include the pallets of the Venetians but also the impressionists and the expressionists, from Kokoshka to Sironi.
At the same time, her originality, her autonomy which are manifested by a particular force, assurance and musicality of harmonies which conquist whosoever observes. " There is a mystery, something undefinable which arrives while painting " she confides again, " .. where does it come from ? I know that while working, after having imposed space and dynamics of a painting. I must follow an impulse and my paintings finish themselves when they want to. On the other hand, our whole existence is an interwiding of combinations, with a force which accompanies us from where we come and to where we shall go ".
I am happy to present Carola Mazot because I know and esteem her.