Fine Art Asia 2022

Marcello Morandini

5  – 8 Oct 2022

Novalis Art Design, Booth B9

Hall 3C, Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention centre

Event organized in the occasion of: Giornata del Contemporaneo – Edizione 18

Promoted by: AMACI – Associazione dei Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Italiani

Supported by: the Italian Cultural Institute in Hong Kong, Italia Mia

Part of: Italy-China Year of Culture and Tourism 2022

Marcello Morandini: Inhabiting Geometry
Vera Canevazzi

 

“I have always inhabited this word (of geometry)
and it has always contributed a lot to the other world (of life)”

M. Morandini, 2017

 

For Fine Art Asia 2022, Novalis Art Design of Hong Kong presents “Inhabiting Geometry”, a solo show dedicated to the Italian artist, architect, and designer Marcello Morandini (Mantua, 1940), with a selection of fourteen works, including four objects of design.

Morandini’s artistic production began in the early 1960s in a climate of great experimentation and of rupture with tradition and Art Informel. In this context, the artist elaborates a rigorous visual grammar that will remain, for the entire course of his career, his signature style. Always maintaining a strong aesthetic and conceptual consistency, Morandini studies and designs geometrical forms. He disassembles them and rebuilds them. He moves them within a space delimited by a square. He gives them volume, transforming them in tridimensional sculptures or in actual architectures, as in the case of the skyscrapers built in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

His compositions are the result of specific and unique projects, in a constant variation of the geometries, with “opening spheres, lozenges under torsion, enlarging rectangles simulating an elastic effect, overlapping surfaces, are subject to innumerable variations, conceivable in tiny or gigantic dimensions, in a series or as unique pieces, manually or industrially built” as critique Gillo Dorfles comments in the text for the solo room dedicated to the then twenty-eight year old Marcello Morandini at the 1968 Venice Biennale.

From the first years of his artistic activity Morandini demonstrates great versatility (he worked as a graphic designer, designer and architect) and an enormous proactive energy: he is in fact invited to exhibit and participate in activities of various avant-garde realities such as Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, Galleria del Deposito of Genoa Boccadasse, where Germano Celant curated his first personal show in 1965, or Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa, where in 1968 he realized a visual-auditive-olfactive-gustative-tactile project titled “ Sensorium”. For Galleria La Bertesca, famous for having hosted the first exhibition dedicated to Arte Povera curated by Germano Celant in 1967, Morandini was also involved as architect and designer: he managed the restructuring of the space, he designed the logo and oversaw the layout of some catalogues, such as those for Alighiero Boetti in 1967.

In those same years Morandini was called to participate in the most important international art events: in 1967 at the IX Biennale of Sao Paulo in Brazil, in 1968 at the Venice Biennale, in an edition that was trampled by students protests. In 1969 he exhibited at the international exhibition “New Tendencies” in Zagreb, with his friends Paolo Scheggi and Getullio Alviani: an occasion that will put him in touch with the international environment connected to new research on the three-dimensional. Later on, he was invited to Documenta in Kassel in 1977 and in 1982, two of the most innovative editions that will see, among other things, Friedrichsplatz dominated by Land Art artworks by Walter De Maria (1977) and Joseph Beuys (1982). From the 1970s Morandini detached himself from the heavily politicized Italian artistic environment and increasingly concentrated on exhibiting in Switzerland and Germany, thanks to the introduction to famous collector and merchant Carl Laszlo who led him to the most important galleries and institutions, including Kestner-Gesellschaft of Hannover, that dedicated a personal show to him in 1972.

From 1976 to 1986 Morandini connected with the International Study Centre of Constructive Art “Arbeitskreis” (founded in Antwerp in 1972), participating in various “Symposiums”: annual appointments intended for research and “scientific” discussion, organized every year in a different country. The artist adheres and gives impetus to the ambitions of European Concrete Art, a current that explores new rules of figurative representation, inheriting geometric/abstract experimentations from the historical avant-garde groups of the early 1900s – Futurism, Constructivism, De Stijl and the school of Bauhaus. The followers of these movements wanted to radically change the way of seeing and deconstruct the traditional vision of art, to rebuild a new system or, as Thomas Kuhn would define it, a “paradigm” of artistic language. shape and movement that is created, thus in Sedia Bine ( 1991 ), a design object made for Sawaya and Moroni, perspective is accentuated through a series of lines that emphasize the silhouette of a chair. Even in storage furniture Valentina and Costanza ( 2015 ) he adopts a two-tone design, while in Stuhltisch ( 2014 ), a surrealist-inspired table made for Atelier Bruno Longoni, the choice is all white.

In response to these stimuli, Marcello Morandini finds in mathematical geometry his criteria of order and construction of reality. Through lines and absolute forms, the artist produces models that define space, the arrangement of elements and time. Spatial and temporal dimensions are interconnected through formulas established by the artist, creating a complex visual mechanism that is unique and spectacular. Also, the choice of titles, formed by impersonal numerical series, suggests a mathematical-geometrical dimension that transcends any form of representation or abstraction from reality. Thus we see works created with inkjet on wood panels “670A-2018”, “673-2018”, “707- 2020”,”712-2020”,”638-2015”, that despite being two-dimensional, have a strong spatiality and volumetry, in which rhythmically alternating successions of lines and forms create recognizable minimal patterns, in an optical-perceptive game that is close to the research of Optical Art. Looking at the work “673-2018”, we grasp the artist’s idea of stopping the moment of a movement, where the center of a square is pulled, encouraging the spectator to imagine the progress of this evolution.

The shape of the support is an integral part of the artwork and is functional to the represented geometry, as in “707-2020” where the rotation of two squares creates a star with eight tips, that corresponds to a symbol of ancient tradition (from Mesopotamian to Christian art), enclosing in its center an octagonal ‘black hole’, geometric but mysterious.

Two-dimensional projects are transformed into actual “depicted-objects”, as in the plexiglass panel “597-2012” or that in white lacquered wood “620-2014”, by crystallizing a moment of the rhythmic motion of a square, which rotating on two of its vertices creates an infinitely repeatable pattern. The geometric space becomes three- dimensional, entering real space, as in the plexiglass sculptures “417A-2001_2018” and “634-2015”, where the evolution of a potentially eternal movement is abruptly interrupted by the artist with a fracture of the forms. The sculptures always start from two-dimensional studies that are subsequently transformed into solids, as in the case of “40B-1968_2009”, created in 2009 but conceived in 1968 with other structures where the frame of a cube is progressively deconstructed.

Other than these works, four objects of design are presented in the exhibition: the bench “Posseduta” (1998-2008), the table-chair “Stuhltisch” (2014), the storage cabinet “Maria” (2015) and the lamp “Lampada Bianera” (1983–2021). Morandini applies the same aesthetic principles to these objects of design, conceived for important ateliers such as Cleto Munari for the bench “Posseduta” or Bruno Longoni for the table-chair “Stuhltisch”. The peculiarity of these furnishings is that they lose the meaning of their function, they are created with unusual, almost surreal geometrical forms. For example, with the bench “Posseduta”, Morandini says it is “certainly more spectacular than comfortable, it is the opposite to what it would normally be correct to do. Although in this case it was intentional: the pleasure of finding an active and surprising architecture for a traditional passive object”.

Even in this case, the artist wants to break away from the traditional vision of the world to rebuild a completely new one. We see the same procedure with the table-chair “Stuhltisch”, which is a single plank on two chairs, that are essentially unusable because they function as ‘legs’ of the table. The storage cabinet “Maria” and the lamp “Lampada Bianera” are less surreal but have a strong graphic component. The first presents itself as a black monolith, with sequences of fine and parallel white lines that run along the whole perimeter of the work and reunite in a concentric black vortex, a kind of hole that attracts all forces. The more minimal lamp consists of a steel triangular base prism painted in black and a container and light source, in which a polycarbonate white pyramid sits and diffuses light throughout the space.

Morandini’s work is a constant and rigorous research of balance between absolute and eternal perfection of geometric shapes and human space, changeable and relative, through a visual language that surpasses all canons, calling into question our certainties.

SELECTED WORKS