Criticisms

"David’s paintings are not just mere faithful reports of reality. Even though they embrace the charm of  naturalness that is rare in present day artwork, what is most important is that the works  communicate with the paint and the artist enables  us to understand  that this, by all means,  in not a dead language. It is a dialog with different interlocutors  that pursuits  since at least three centuries  and is recognized  amongst others for  the unmistakable accents of Caravaggio and Vermeer, of Recco and  Chardin.

The easiness  of interpretation that comes from the figure of an agave or a group of anchovies, of a basket of plums or a

pendulum of sorbs is introduced to our eyes, enabling  us to  peacefully inspect every smallest detail it is merely the starting point, the preliminary condition  to enable us to  appreciate the quality,  which is everything  but common, of these paintings,  from the intense pictorial weaving, supported by a delicate and insinuating variety of chromatic humors."

Giuseppe Tanzillo, 2000

"It is ' indeed atypical the way in which  the paintings  of Mauro David succeed in reconciling the strong perceptive impact, provoked by opposing,   and  sometimes even violent, light-dark partitions with the singular sweetness of the mixture, the essentiality of the composition  and the sobriety of the chromatic material. The outcome of this art is  so near  to  the world of our daily affections that an example would be a painting from the precious ancient taste."

Lucia Lorenzini, 2001

"Therefore what is the  true time of David’s paintings?  His works appear  as though they have not been touched by the  problems and torments  of contemporary art, they depict adventures  that have taken place far from the present-day mishap land. Someone  has seen the signs of a happy return to the late eight hundreds and the resumption of certain aspects of Southern realism  freed, equally,  from the bitterness of the social denunciations and  sentimental languor.

Even if, in many female figures the artist actually seems to correspond certain examples  of portraits of that time that nevertheless continue to  capture the heart of so many collectionist,  still life , that represents the predominant part  of his production, the mind has turned elsewhere.

The memory and imagination circuits that are inextricably always gathered  in David, space themselves  with notable liberty on  more ample territories, gravitating  in the vicinity of some well known passages of the year six-hundred, where familiar Neapolitan accents resonate . Actually, the time of David’s paintings  is what we ourselves are living and not the forgetful and underprivileged present  of those who strenuously solicit and pursue the society of consumption.  Bringing back a critical label that had a range of fortune in the last decades, Mauro David  could be defined as being an  ‘anachronous ', because  in his   creations there are signals, as all the things that  belong to the horizon of the present, of things that  belong to different ages and wander with  the memoirs of the past  longing  for that happy season  that each one of us believes to have left behind.”

Carlo M. Avolio, 2001

His  paintings  reach an amazing realistic effectiveness, possess strong composition   that  assigns  a correct position for everything. An extremely simple and rigorous spatial metric always advances on a single axis, , horizontal or vertical, according with  format of the painting, carefully distributing the elements of the composition so as to avoid  unbalance and disorganized overcrowdings. The art of Mauro David is the furthest that can be expected from the confused and approximate extemporaneity of so many figurative artist  who  believe expressive sincerity would consist in  placing,   on the surface of the picture,  the casualness of his own impressions  of  reality. Everything included in the  painting seems to respond to  a principle of order, not destined to  mortify sensibility, but, for the purpose of exalting its values, provided that we remain  within the limits of a conception that understands how to acclimate  reason and  imagination.

In this way   the color  does not grant anything to the easy mannerism of the material influence or   the dribbles and irregularity of the ductus. Even  when it doesn't emerge from the obscurity of the background,  it results as being in accord with a plastic form which is clearly defined. Nevertheless, when David’s paintings  are observed with attention, one  realizes that  there is a great variety of  bright and chromatic gradients and that this variety  can  sometimes reach, in particular in still life  with fish and shellfish,  to graze the sumptuous beauty of certain Baroque compositions.

Davids artwork  is never the result of an exercise in itself. The compact smoothness of the layouts  serve to accomplish a total adherence of color  to the represented subject, to the point of making it  become the skin of a reality returned miraculously to life in the dimension of the painting"

Luigi Simonetti, 2000

In front of these paintings, where every detail seems to respond to a specific  demand for truth, in accordance with  visual perception of the phenomenal world, one can observe that the foremost quality of Mauro David consists of an extraordinary mimetic ductility that allows him to revive,    in the virtual space of the painting,  that fragment of reality on which,  from time to time,  his attention falls.  His  paintings,  remote  from the sophisticated and free intellectualisms of  many contemporary artworks,  seem to have  the  value of  verbal communication with a clear  and convincing evidence of common sense. To understand that this is not so and that the impression of familiarity with which these paintings are introduced  is not  justified by  genuine  availability to conform with the data supplied  by the perceptive optics, but called in cause before the uncertain   virtuosity of the technique, precise cultural options and linguistics, it is sufficient to compare the still life  of David with that pictorial productions that are  available on the circuits  of the market, which, encounter  a diffusion  of  comprehensibility of the artistic language furnishing  imagery  that brighten  the  " truth " and  make use of  the most vulgar chromatic procurings. David's work, easily accessible in its  figurative content, but gifted of a solid formal structure and  seductive and castigated beauty,  is distant from examples of bad taste that  tend to prepare an exaggeration  of color on sites of  moral  humiliation and poverty. Here, instead, in the silent and peaceful dignity of a painting that evokes people and objects in a  domestic world,  there is a precise choice, born on the  grounds  of an assiduous and vigilant attendance of  tradition, which references the sources, above all, of the year six-hundred naturalism and repetitive in its motivations of ethical order"

Vitaliano Corbi, 2001