UMBERTO MANZO

Invisibili Trame

Umberto Manzo’s huge studio is located in the small town of Rotondi, in the Valle Caudina. There, far from everything, the artist cuts and hides; he paints and buries. This is a work beyond all measure, in which can be glimpsed the traces of a journey that has continued uninterrupted for some forty years, seemingly without ever fixing a destination. What counts, for Manzo, is to set out every day, leaving his mark on endless rolls of dusting paper which, once cut up into sections, find refuge in long and deep drawers. They may remain there for years, or indeed forever. But sometimes they emerge from the shadows to be swallowed up by his object-works.

Like a scribe, Manzo scribbles on his sheets with sudden, pulsating marks. They may be stains, calligraphy, or hallucinations created in a state of creative abandonment that is free from the censoring filter of rationality. His is an irregular and even unconscious painting that intercepts a plural self in which the artist encounters multiplicity. Here are filaments, traces, suggestions. Everything is offloaded onto the sheets, without any a priori data. Manzo here follows an intimate and silent rituality that appears as the best remedy for the unbridled need for self-exhibition. The artist, like his painting, loves to disappear, and his public appearances are kept to a minimum, as if they were a hindrance to him. If social rules did not compel him to show his works, he would avoid even this, except for the pleasure of taking them out of his studio from time to time. What interests him most is feeding his database until it overflows into an explosive expansion of the sign that will never be captured by any algorithm.

text from the exhibition catalogue

Alberto fiz