The volume is issued on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere and reproduces works by eleven artists (Gianfranco Baruchello, Giosetta Fioroni, Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti, Franco Nonnis, Gastone Novelli, Achille Perilli, Carol Rama, Giovanna Sandri, Toti Scialoja and Luigi Serafini), who were friends and collaborators of Giorgio Manganelli, or on whom he had occasion to write the texts recently collected in the volume Emigrazioni oniriche.
While in his hitherto neglected trajectory as an eccentric observer of art, Manganelli alternated a wandering and desultory gaze (as in the Salons column, collected in 1987 into the homonymous volume) with a concealed competence as a connoisseur of repertoires such as painting of the 17th and 18th century, in his writings about the artists of his time (with some of whom he was on closer terms than with contemporary writers). The rhetorical distance was shortened and his became a conversation between peers and unequals, “small and angry” for whom his support, affection, his – for once sincere – admiration was unfailing. The introduction by Andrea Cortellessa, who reconstructs this network of interchanges, is followed by insights by other scholars into some of these fruitful relationships. What emerges is a varied and rugged landscape, neurotic and ferocious in the combinations and mutual hunger that united artists in different fields at that time.
In the eighties, Manganelli had a relationship of true complicity with Lea Vergine, which gave him access to the harsh and delightful graces of the “other half of the avant-garde”. The appendix reproduces the conversations between the two, and the texts they wrote about each other. The volume ends with a bibliography of writings by Manganelli to the artists of his time.
€ 25,00