Umberto Manzo ^©  

(1960)

Literature:

"Umberto Manzo - Un orizzonte metafisico", scritp by Vittoria Coen, Tullio Pronti Editore, 1998, illustrated on page not numbered 

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After graduating in Scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, from the mid-eighties the research of Umberto Manzo (Naples, 1960) is characterized by the articulated use of heterogeneous techniques and materials, such as photographic emulsion, graphite drawing, oil painting, experimentation with colors and vegetable glues, to elaborate provisional syntheses that define a visual palimpsest intimately rooted in the daily operation and in the memorial processes of the artist.

Layering their own designs and placing them in the thickness of the frame, structuring the depth of the work through multiform cuts that outline the canvas, giving the case a documentary value, Manzo brings out from the materiality of the elements a multiplicity of narrations even just suggested in the appearance and fragmentary arrangement, in which figuration is increasingly a mental process and the work a modular reorganization, however elusive and mobile: "the display cases, the frames and the arrangement of the drawings in the space assigned to them testify to the inclination to the reconstruction of an order - cosmic, architectural or moral - that is necessary [...] to the expression of their functional laws of placement, of dynamic organization" (Gigiotto del Vecchio).

(Taken from the artist’s biography on the website of the Museo Madre di Napoli)