francescomanetti

[francescomanetti]

BIO & ARTISTIC VIEW.

Born in Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, September the 13, 1982, Francesco Manetti grew up devoted to Art, especially the visual arts. Since he was a child he nurtured a love for drawing and painting, for graphics and illustration. At the age of 20 he started composing his first works with greater dedication and in-depth research, strongly inspired by the work of contemporary masters such as Jean Michel Basquiat, Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly, just to name the most important. At the age of 23 he started studying visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara (Italy), where he developed that combination of techniques and disciplines that then characterized his future artistic project. In his early artistic career, parallel to the painting, he dedicated a particular attention to the world of illustration, to which he dedicated his degree thesis, which took place in 2010. He has worked assiduously in the field of illustration collaborating with various publishing houses specialized in illustrated books for children. At the same time, he has carried on his pictorial project, through collective and solo exhibitions, in a constant evolutive “work in progress” that has led him to his actual artistic way based on the abstract expressionism style, a fertile ground for a totally free artistic and existential expression. 

In his artworks Francesco Manetti brings together everything that he assimilates in everyday life, both in visual, auditory and emotional terms. This constant tangle of elements is abstractly translated and visually synthesized by him into images that are deliberately not figurative, but visually poetic. Codes and mappings of the surrounding world summarized in layered emotions that become gesture and color. Delicacy and rude gesture. The call of beauty, through color, composing by contrast. It is the search for the balance between order and chaos that drives him to create paintings. 

Francesco Manetti mainly works with acrylic painting on canvas, that is prepared with a first layer of plaster that represents a real first step in the creation of the artwork. The plaster makes the canvas a more processable surface that can be carved, ribbed, consumed: it's like to give it a “first level of soul”. The artworks then acquires the other “soul's levels” with a stratification of multiple layers, where each one of them represents a different step in the completion of the work: an intricate combination of colors, marks and scratches that goes to compone the unique and final body of the opera.

PAST EXHIBITIONS

2023 | Impronte d’Arte part II, Duepuntozero art gallery, Bergamo, Italy (collective exhibition)

2022 | Impronte d’Arte part I, Duepuntozero art gallery, Bergamo, Italy (collective exhibition)

2022 | Art.Box.Project Palma 1.0, Casa del Arte, Palma de Maiorca, Spain (collective exhibition)

2022 | Open Art, Art Number 23 art gallery, Barcelona, Spain (collective exhibition)

2022 | Biennale di Vercelli, Studio 256 art gallery, Vercelli, Italy (collective exhibition) 

2013 | Gipsy Art, Gipsy House Casa del Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina (collective exhibition)

2012 | La Noce a Tre Canti art gallery, Pietrasanta, Italy (personal exhibition)

2007 | Brainstorming art festival, Fortezza Vecchia, Livorno, Italy (collective exhibition)

2007 | Effetto Refugio, Officina Refugio art gallery, Livorno, Italy (collective exhibition)

2006 | Pollock art gallery, Pisa (PI), Italy (collective exhibition)

2006 | Effetto Refugio, Officina Refugio art gallery, Livorno, Italy (collective exhibition)

2005 | Efetto Venezia art festival, Livorno, Italy (collective exhibition)

CONTACTS.

Official instagram channel: francescomanetti_paintings

Inquiries/collaborations: francescomanetti82@tutanota.com

WHERE TO BUY MY ART.

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[francescomanetti]

“Sooner or later we'll be soon or late”. 2022. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino.

Want to control the time it's like an highway; where does the road lead? What if we immediately turned right? What if... If, if, if, if... If. How many if. Then, run. Stop. Ahead. Back. Before and after. Under. Above. But most of all, the inability to apologize. And the time that passes and run fast. Or slowly, it depends. In any case, only one is the sure thing: we'll be soon or late. Sooner or later.

[francescomanetti]

“I tell you what you have to do: follow your instinct (oxymoron)”. 2022. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino.

The natural evolution of hypocrisy: the oxymoron: "A rhetorical figure consisting of approaching in the same phrase words that express contrary concepts". The combination of opposites, from which both static and dynamism arise. Inner and outer conflict. Contraposition. Producing tension. The opera is born.

[francescomanetti]

“Tell me how you feel but i don't wanna know it (hypocrisy)”. 2022. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In the constant search for strong contrasts, a particular dedication goes to hypocrisy. Hypocrisy can emerge in the most unexpected moments and ways. In some ways, it can also bring with it a touch of irony, so much is the absurdity that in some circumstances it brings with it. A game of opposites, a short circuit of nonsense, like putting together two concepts that are the polar opposite of the other.

Is it possible to ask for something and deny it at the same time? This is where the fascinating tension of the contrast lies: two concepts that are impossible to unite find their glue precisely in the subject to which this work is dedicated: hypocrisy: Paradoxically, a meeting point.

[francescomanetti]

“It is not. Never. Too. Late”. 2022. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino.

Courage lies in the middle of our fears. Words can be like our fears. Individually they can have a negative meaning. Recombined together they create something diametrically opposite. Words like fears, their union like courage, which is right there in the middle. It is not. Never. Too. Late.

[francescomanetti]

“Spontaneous non Spontaneous”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino, by white snowy landscapes, by the contrast between the silence of the mountain environment and the syncopated tension of jazz music. 

Put yourself on the edge of a blade. To live the moment in equilibrium between two opposite emotional conditions create a deep state of tension, that can let you fall into the empty-full on the sides, or resist on that edge and see what will happen. To be spontaneous into the non-spontaneity: non-sense, paradox. From there is where a flame can arise from. It’s like to live into a sort of dadaist moment where You at the same time experience two opposite conditions and where all hasn't any meaning but has it at the same time. To push the spirit at the limit of chaos, passing through a storm and at the end find the exact, unique in the entire Universe, equilibrium. It's suffering and joy at the same exact moment. Spontaneous in the non-spontaneity. Possible (?).

[francescomanetti]

“The wait (all i can do is)”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

The painting was created in my hometown, Livorno, on the tuscan seaside west coast. With this paint i wanted talk about these hard times we are living in. As always in my works the theme of the contrasts and the opposites returns. All it seems at the same time in movement but static. Motionless dynamism. The wait as a time frame.

[francescomanetti]

“Till i die (tribute)”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

The painting was created in my hometown, Livorno, on the tuscan seaside west coast. With this paint i wanted to honor all the things that counts in life and for which it is worth living. Each person has their own ones for which it's good to say "till i die". It's a tribute.

[francescomanetti]

“Memories from a sunset (Cadiz Summer)”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino, by the scent of autumn trees, by the contrast between the silence of the mountain environment and the syncopated tension of jazz music. This physical and emotional container acted as a filter and support for fragments of memory, for a memory, for a time, a moment, so close, so far away. Forever eternal.

[francescomanetti]

“Growing”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting, paper collage and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino, by the scent of autumn trees, by the contrast between the silence of the mountain environment and the syncopated tension of jazz music. This canvas has represented a trip from dark to light. From the below to the above. Layer by layer, i have tried to let it out different emotions connected to equal colors. In a growing of frequencies i have finally exploded in a jazzy interconnection of colored pieces that has found their own equilibrium after a peaceful war of opposites.

[francescomanetti]

“Fall”. 2020. 60cm x 80cm. Acrylic paining and paper collage on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino, by the scent of autumn trees, by the contrast between the silence of the mountain environment and the syncopated tension of jazz music. When i have painted this canvas, i have focalized my attention on the colors i was seeing outside my window and those were the colors of the autumn. Then, as often i try to do during my working process, i imagined a total different context, i have thought to the wall of a big city and i have tried to bring the autumn on that wall. This paint has been the final result of this abstraction trip, as a prosecution of the research i do about contraposition and contrast.

[francescomanetti]

“Blue Night”. 2020. 60cm x 80cm. Acrylic painting and paper collage on canvas. 

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino, by the scent of autumn trees, by the contrast between the silence of the mountain environment and the syncopated tension of jazz music, all along a night, with its contrast between dream and reality, the dark of the sky opposed to the light of the stars. The cold outside, the warm inside. Always the contrast as a way of research.

[francescomanetti]

“Where i left off”. 2020. 80cm x 60cm. Acrylic painting and paper collage on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino, by the scent of autumn trees, by the contrast between the silence of the mountain environment and the syncopated tension of jazz music.In particular, this canvas represented a point of restart, or rather, a new departure. A landing point from the past and also a point with the past. A present point and a starting point towards new stories, new worlds, new life.