Venue
Studio Guastalla Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Via Senato, 24
Milan
Hours
10 am – 1 pm and 3pm – 7 pm except Mondays and public holidays.
Opening Wednesday May 24, 6 pm
Studio Guastalla Arte Moderna e Contemporanea is pleased to present in the gallery spaces a selection of twelve Manifesti Poetici by artist, photographer and writer Moreno Gentili, including an unpublished one, printed in Braille characters, in collaboration with the Istituto dei Ciechi di Milano.
The manifesti poetici are a model of shared communication that the author, Moreno Gentili, invented more than twenty years ago and that over time has been structured as an organic series of germinative works in continuous evolution, starting from that first single gesture/action of making the word form; a concatenation of words and short phrases, ringed in a single hyperbolic anaphora starting from a generating code, such as: “Ti amo”, “Bevo”, or from an imperative: “Piantana”, “Semina”, “Servila”, but also from adverbs of affirmation, such as: “sì”, “no”, repeated 365 times.
If the work is a synthesis, the project is a path of research and maturation that hosts and provokes the change of creative modes and their implementation. The manifesti poetici are a work-project that lives on the encounters with people who discover the project, buy the poster and continue the dialogue with the artist and his words.
Manifesti poetici have been exhibited over the years in various places in the city, from the café Cucchi to the Franco Parenti Theatre, public spaces of sharing and exchange according to the author’s beloved formula of art as civil emotion, outside any institutional path and close to people’s lives. For the first time, they are now proposed by a gallery, for two essential reasons:
the first is recognition of Manifesti poetici as a work, understood therefore in its art-historical design value in the wake of the avant-garde manifestos of the early 20th century;
the second is the opportunity to present an unpublished manifesto, created in synergy with the Istituto dei Ciechi di Milano and representing a new step in the reception/communication of the project.
Today, touch is added to looking and listening. The ‘Luce’ Manifesto was printed in Braille characters, thus readable by visually impaired people through hand gestures. Between the index finger and the paper, the words take on light and language becomes a ‘motor act’.
The adoption of a new form brings a mutation of the work to a new scale of communication and to a new conceptual identity: that of the tactile map. The Braille code must in fact be traced on the opposite side of the page, reversing not only the arrangement of the characters (from right to left), but also the format. The tactile alphabet consists of six raised dots inscribed in a rectangular space approximately the size of the index fingertip; the dots are coded to form all letters. These symbols are shared by most existing cultures and therefore suitable for different languages. Poetic manifestos are an ongoing translation of a single creative gesture.
Braille has definitively sanctioned, no strings attached, the educability and the intellectual growth of the blind. It has included the blind in the panorama of cultural itineraries available to all. Where there is inclusion, there is Braille. Where there is Braille there is inclusion! Through Braille, Moreno Gentili’s poetic manifestos acquire new meaning.
[…] «Ti amo perché sai di montagna, Ti amo perché pazzeggi, Ti amo per difenderti, Ti amo perché ci stai, Ti amo perché sei tonica, Ti amo perché hai paura, Ti amo perché sei felice, Ti amo perché sai di panna, Ti amo con furore, Ti amo in Svizzera, Ti amo a Hiroshima, Ti amo sotto la doccia, Ti amo senza appello, Ti amo perché ti offendi, Ti amo perché arrossisci, Ti amo da dentro, Ti amo se ti penso, Ti amo perché sei venuta, Ti amo tra gli ulivi, Ti amo se ti fermi, Ti amo se mi apprezzi, Ti amo tra un lavoro e l’altro, Ti amo davanti al Botticelli, Ti amo sul divano, Ti amo se ti vedo, Ti amo se ti parlo, Ti amo a tavola, Ti amo nella pioggia, Ti amo a Parigi, Ti amo come un fico secco, Ti amo a Capri, Ti amo in fotocopia, Ti amo tra le fiamme, Ti amo in rovina, Ti amo da re,» […]
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I manifesti poetici e la parola data
by Moreno Gentili
In our time, the word seems to have an ever-increasing importance, as if images, in their jumbling together, run the risk of becoming invisible, precipitating into a dispersive collective imagination.
So what? We are losing the importance of words, Rosetta Loy, a refined writer who knows the value of words such as: memory, history, love, once told me. So, from 2000, I started to put words, or rather stories, next to images and the Series project was born, now part of the Maxxi collection in Rome.
I reduced the images more and more, to the point of reversing the context: ‘Ora et Labora’, ‘Bevo Vivere’ and others. Later came the ‘manifesti frase’ such as ‘Liberati dalle Mafie’, created for Don Ciotti’s Libera Association against the Mafia, and the ‘Politikal’, dedicated to politics.
The turning point was the switch to ‘365 posters’, a series of posters dedicated to germ words such as NO, PIANTALA (made to raise funds for research against AIDS), then TI AMO, SERVILA, a hilarious icon of our time.
In this series of posters, the word becomes a mantra, a sound repeated and varied for 365 times, a word for every day of the year, a note, a rhythm, a continuous quotation; a poetic verse dense with irony, suggestion and also passion. A mark on the white poster of the page that becomes large and takes up the space of the wall, of living. Then, when day turns to night, the words begin to function no longer as sun, but as stars. It is nocturnal, white writing.
White words on black, stellar dissemination, galaxies, these are the manifestos of the “nera” series: NOTTE, LUCE, SERVILA, BAUDELAIRE and here comes colour, life, a new season and then colour, red for NATALE, blue for CAPODANNO, a new series of MANIFESTI in the wake of poetry.