Umberto Manzo
February 16 — April 7, 2018
Since the Eighties, the work of the Neapolitan artist has been marked by a path which has led him to measure himself against heterogeneous materials such as photographic emulsion, graphite, oil painting, vegetable colours and glue until he developed his own, unmistakable language.
In his most recent works, the artist has experimented with new formal solutions in order to realize his archives of memory. He continues to stratify his drawings and arranges them in the thickness/depth of the canvas subsequently creating manifold cuts, outlines of classical sculptures, profiles, through which layers of paper re-emerge to reveal an infinity of narratives. As in his early works, the human body remains his most recognizable stylistic feature and becomes a unit of measure of space and time.
This artist scrutinizes beyond the surface, in search of multiple significances, of a new order which also explores the space of classical architecture, of monuments from the remote past, such as the Piscina Mirabilis or the Roman amphitheatres evoked in his latest works.