Riccardo Mannelli. BELLEZZA VERA [TRUE BEAUTY]

From 10 September until 2 October, the Galleria Gagliardi will be presenting “Bellezza Vera” [True Beauty], a solo exhibition of works by Riccardo Mannelli, featuring about fifteen mixed techniques on framed cotton paper, along with dozens of drawings and watercolours of precious painting and graphic quality. As always, Mannelli stages stories where bodies and faces are presented with the awareness that, as the curator of the exhibition Alessandra Frosini writes “...beauty is a fragile gift par excellence, which transforms us, leaves a trace and breathes life into us, nourished by our limits and by our potential. Once we meet beauty, we simply cannot do without it, because it does not coincide with perfection but is rather a state of the Soul.” In Mannelli’s works, the curator explains “… Nothing is left to chance and so, in editing the compositions and building up the drawing of these figures, we find points of reference rooted in the artistic tradition of the past, starting from the Tuscan 15th century, progressing through symbolism and German expressionism and via authors like Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele, from whom he borrows a new synthesis between soul and senses, revealed in a more intimate dimension of reality. Among his contemporaries, he is close to the neo-expressionist realism of Lucian Freud, of which he underscores the marks left by life on human bodies. From Francis Bacon he takes and presents the style which invents the body and places it in the space, on the surface of the painting, according to a movement capable of conceiving a body, granting the eye unprecedented angles and surfaces. What is created is a simultaneous story, which runs by at high speed when the word-sign slows down, concentrating and expanding space. To quote Roland Barthes, storytelling falls within a trans-historical category, detached from time, which can be embodied in countless tangible supports, from words to actions, writings and images. Mannelli is the author of stories in which most of the atmosphere remains suspended, to stretch the imagination, to create a balance which is always precarious, to grasp the here and now, cancelling one way of storytelling and forming another, different way, with a rhythm all of its own.”