13th April – 7th May 2024

From April 13th to May 7th 2024 Galleria d’arte La Fonderia presents Azulejos, Tommaso Mannucci aka Monograff solo exhibition.On show the Florentine artist’s latest production, characterized by bichromatic painting dominated by blue and white, inspired by the two-dimensionality of the cyanotype and the typical Iberian decorations Azulejos, ceramic tiles with glazed and decorated surfaces that enrich public and private buildings. The reference to this type of decoration dear to the artist can be found in the first part of the exhibition, with a series of small square works, on which is articulated a path that faces the various layers of the ground and the various natural phases, from the texture of the stone to the vegetation that emerges from them. Thus a common thread of reading is outlined which continues and focuses on the concreteness and mutability of matter. Political and personal events, contrasts and internal conflicts led the artist to think about himself through perforated, torn and darkened marble textures and shapes in which, however, the intrinsic nature of matter itself is not changed. A sort of environmental self-portrait, how nature and man shape the marble, social and cultural events shape Monograff: the material represented, rock and stone, they are the desire to depict an individual or any form of life that one must often adapt to circumstances, to situations, with compromises and changes in form without affecting its essence.Monograff’s reflections also focus on extraction in the quarries, which can be traced back to the titles of the works themselves: 5% is the percentage of the removed marble used for artistic purposes, while 17% is for architectural works. Marble is a resource that does not renew itself and mountains are constantly being carved out, devastating the cultural and environmental heritage. Thus we turn our attention to those residual areas which after being exploited remain abandoned and those which still survive anthropisation. An interstitial landscape that Gilles Clément calls the Third Landscape, in the sense of what is neither light, nor shadow: it is the set of these undecided spaces, neglected by the domination of land exploitation constitutes the only refuge for biodiversity, in which vegetation takes over the spaces without being constrained, guided and themed by man.To complete the exhibition itinerary there is a sculpture that materializes Monograff’s research, making the forms only depicted through painting tangible and delocalizing the material from the canvas to real space.