2019 - Galleria Gagliardi, MUST - Museo Storico della Città di Lecce
Via degli Ammirati, 11 - Lecce (Italy)
Kunstschau_Collective Art Group presents the exhibition Diario di un vizio, an anthological exhibition of the artist Riccardo Mannelli at MUST – Historical Museum of Lecce and, from Wednesday March 6, the special project at the headquarter of Kunstschau.
Riccardo Mannelli has always been committed to a deep and radical investigation of contemporary society through his caustic portraits of politicians and his satire of customs, and is considered one of the world’s leading interpreters of drawing and illustration. Ironic, irreverent, a refined explorer of the human soul, for over forty years he has been working on a very personal recontruction of beauty, both through his daily militancy in the journalistic field(L’Europeo, La Stampa, Il Manifesto, La Repubblica, Il Fatto quotidiano) and in his pictorial production where he explores the characters, the dark sides and the neurosis of human relations.
“Mannelli’s Diary – writes Roberto Lacarbonara in the catalogue – the one on which the tuscan artist has been recording the vices, bad habits and decadence of a population for forty years, is the greatest anatomical screenplay of the present, the stage of beauty as a promise– maybe unfulfilled – of happiness and emancipation. The “body” is the protagonist of Mannelli’s drawing and painting. Total-body, flesh-body, screen-body on which time projects the cavernicular shadows of everyday life. A body that has always been unresolved in western culture, first Greek then Judaeo-Christian and finally Cartesian, torn to pieces by the razor-shaving of morals and reason”.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the famous movie by Marco Ferreri (1993) and defines a very close affinity with the intentions and the poetics of the director. That vice, elaborated by Ferreri through the sexual and anguished obsessions of the protagonist, worms his way into the dephts of modern man, especially by virtue of the most subtle forms of power that act on our body and our mind.
“When comedy becomes caustic or moving, when it does not make you laugh if not through your teeth and with ill-concealed bitterness, it is there that reality becomes explicit, straightforward, neurotic. We learn this from Fellini’s Clowns, from Pasolini’s I ragazzi di vita; our proverbs have always told us this; but above all, the great masters of political and customs satire, from Pino Zac and Vincino to Riccardo Mannelli, make it a profession”.
On display at the MUST will be large sections of the pictorial work of Riccardo Mannelli over the course of about twenty years, between 2000 and 2019. From Appunti per la ricostruzione della bellezza to the Blues and Hasta mañana mi amor, up to the recent series Ammazzami, works dedicated to gender-based violence. There will also be a Drawing Room, a Portrait Room and a Satyr Room.
For the first time in Italy, the movie Riccardo Mannelli: Notes for the Reconstruction of Beauty by Gianluca Draghetti, made on the occasion of the great solo exhibition at the Building Bridges Art exchange in Los Angeles in 2016, will be presented. The movie contains testimonies by journalists, curators and professionals from the artistic and journalistic world of Mannelli, including Ascanio Celestini, Vittorio Sgarbi and Marco Travaglio.
At Kunstschau’s white cube the project Commedia in Z.E.R.O.(2001-2005) will be exhibited in a setting forbidden to children under 16 years of age.
The event is sponsored by Regione Puglia and Comune di Lecce in collaboration with Galleria Gagliardi in San Gimignano (Siena) ITALY.
Biography
Riccardo Mannelli was born in Pistoia in 1955, he lives in Rome and is one of the sharpest and most incisive italian pencils. He is a designer, illustrator, painter, portraitist and author of drawn reportages. After Il Male he has been the protagonist of the most important experiences of satirical printing in Italy and has collaborated with numerous newspaper and magazines (Cuore, Linus, L’Europeo, La Stampa, Il Manifesto, La Repubblica). All this is combined with an intense exhibition activity in Italy and abroad (Appunti per la ricostruzione della bellezza, Contratti contemporanei, Fine penna mai).
He created the virtual frieze “Apoteosi dei corrotti” projected on the outer wall of the Ara Pacis in Rome and in 2009 he collaborated with the Czech photographer Jan Saudek for the “Teneri Barbari” exhibition; in 2011 he exhibited for the first time the entire pictorial cycle “COMMEDIA IN Z.E.R.O.” within the art exhibitions of the 54th Festival of Spoleto. Also in 2011 he was invited to the 54th Biennale of Venezia where he exhibited three works in the Italian Pavillon. In the same year he received the Forte dei Marmi award for political satire.
He teaches life drawing and artistic anatomy at the European Institute of Design.