After the last page comes the first: this introductory statement, which could well be the conclusion, is instead, the beginning. Last June, Riccardo Mannelli and I were sitting at a café, near his studio in Rome. It was a beautiful sunny day. We were having something to drink and watching people pass by. The flow of humanity. Someone we both know asked us how we had met. It was a girl. To my surprise, Riccardo replied: “We met in a brothel”. Obviously he didn’t intend the literal, objective meaning of those words. Brothels no longer exist, and it’s clear our meeting took place in other circumstances. My thoughts had to go beyond his words and their literal meaning, beyond verbal language. Why did Riccardo give that image of our meeting? I started thinking. Actually, I started thinking differently. I had to understand Mannelli. I had to look into the images and not the words. Brothels were places of pleasure, not accepted morally by society. Behind the secrecy of their walls however, the most unimaginable people could meet: politicians, married men, fathers, offspring, mothers and sisters of acquaintances, aristocracy, clergy, much more humanity than one could imagine. A place where they all discovered they were far less different than what they wanted people to believe. To those who entered, life in a brothel was meant to be taken for true life, something real. The stale air was real, the odor of linens, laundry and sex – just like the smells of blood and meat in a butcher shop. By saying we met in a brothel, Mannelli meant our encounter was real, not formal, that it was pleasurable and not based on a false relationship. By saying this, was he saying I understood his artistic path, his works, his way of proceeding and being? By accepting his “human brothel” I was accepting his artistic path. Here is what I can add about Riccardo Mannelli, because much has already been said about him and his art – and much is yet to be said, Mannelli is consistently and concretely real. He winks an eye at no one, seeks no easy gratification, he is not a parlor room painter. His work is one of generosity which means being exacting. From the Latin exactus, to be accurate.  Watching him draw, paint or handle a model, is a thaumaturgic experience. It is thaumaturgic for the culture of opposites which embrace and always determine “a moment of truth”, like when we look at a lifeless body, we understand both the elusiveness and its opposite, the concreteness of the corpse. It is thaumaturgic because Mannelli spares no one, his imprint narrates and speaks, he is in the history of contemporaneity because he refuses the contemporaneity of history. He says something true, and this truth can distress us, as Vittorio Sgarbi suggests. As it is in the brothel, like being before a mirror when we know no one is looking, we admire this truth and know, at heart, that it pertains to us. It is impossible to define Mannelli, he has vast talent, his artistic, humane and intellectual work is complex. I will limit myself to listing part of the reasons which compelled me to produce and curate this exhibition. Reasons which were characterized by particular conditions and circumstances that occurred during this period of work with Mannelli.

I list few of them:

• not having been accepted for such a long time;
• having accepted that others consider our work unnecessary;
• the necessity of building our know-how as self-taught persons;
• the need to have a discipline that made us free;
• the desire to remain foreigners;
• the urge to travel far from lands where art normally dwells;
• the encounter with other “emigrants”;
• the deep conviction that art cannot be but revolt;
• researching the way to transmit the sense of revolt without being overpowered;
• the awareness that the profession of the artist comes from an existential attitude in a single transcultural country.

I’ve long envisioned this country as an archipelago. Its islands as floating islands.

Riccardo Mannelli is one of these floating islands.

Gianluca Draghetti