On the occasion of Maestro Maurizio Bottarelli 's eightieth birthday, the Civic Collection of Drawing of Salò pays homage to the artist with a personal exhibition in which two unpublished cycles of works, which have entered the Collection in recent years, are presented to the public.

Twenty-three works on paper, created in 1963, are dedicated to the writer, playwright and poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). The strength of Bottarelli's material painting gives the images the intensity of the poetry of the last of the cursed poets. In the struggle that emerges between the bodies shaped by color, some of the Welsh writer's dominant themes are evident: life, copulation, death. Bottarelli transfers the flowing energy, based on the variety of rhythms, the multiple cryptic metaphors and the appeal to the senses, from poetry to his work. The forms remain mostly obscure, like the language of the writer.

In Thomas, as in Bottarelli, the relationship with nature is a creative seed. In fact, one card contains some significant verses: “When logics die, / The secret of the soil grows through the eye, / And the blood leaps into the sun”. For both artists life is part of nature and nature is in the art.

After the meeting between the artist and the curator of the Civica Collezione , which took place in the Bolognese studio in November 2019, not only the works of the cycle Homage to Dylan Thomas and a large drawing (made in 1983 and exhibited at MuSa in the exhibition Camminata della linea, from 27 May 2023), but the Artist has also generously proposed to the Committee that twelve of his works be created and sent monthly for an entire year. Thus was born Diario improbable .

After the creation of a landscape and a nude in January and February, the Covid emergency, an unexpected dramatic event, gave a new value to what the artist was creating for the Collection. This Diary has acquired a tragic flavor: faces and masks began to appear in March and the landscapes of the following months were dressed in an atmosphere of uncertainty.

An unusual but significant channel of communication has been established between the artist and the Civica Collezione, which has overcome isolation.