Shapes, sculptures, ideas, and paintings to tell the story of Pascoli's 'music'

“Art is a form, and a form is something that has no history. But it has a destiny,” wrote Jean Baudrillart . We are on the 170th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Pascoli , a legend of the twentieth century. An eloquent and passionate poet, real, fantastic, and musical. This is not just a commemorative occasion, because poetry can live again today in other forms, as confirmed by the pictorial and sculptural work of Mirna Manni (Tuscania, 1958).

Thus, in the Sala delle Tinaie of Villa Torlonia, in San Mauro Pascoli , in the Poetry Park, memory and contemporaneity intertwine. With Pascoli's poetry, we breathe an ancient yet new air, in a journey of introspection that re-enacts the work of a great poet, in a layered and profound exploration of the themes of intimacy, memory, remembrance, life and death. Mirna Manni, with her nine installations, builds new germinal bridges, reactivating thought and consciousness. The virtues of art, as we know, have always offered us spaces of freedom. Here, the artist alchemically transforms, sculpts, and shapes—beyond all limits—raw materials, earth and clay, stoneware and engobes, canvases and papers, to create unusual forms and spaces rich in resonance. Each of her compositions seems to reject all limits, embracing bodies and volumes in their expanse and quantity. Thus, in a gradual becoming, Mother Nature reappears in a continuous transition between thought and image, matter and form.

This exhibition, titled "of small and large things," offers us the opportunity to reflect, in the blink of an eye, on the gradual process of becoming of the small, great things that surround us, both yesterday and today. Works that encompass multiple, interconnected thoughts and reflections, which the artist strips down in their entirety with Pascoli's oeuvre. A temporalization of echoes and precipitations expressed between pictorial substance, the sculptural-ceramic materiality of the forms, between words embroidered on fabrics and canvases. Thin nylon threads hold up cloths bearing the embroidered verses of three of Pascoli's poems: L'imbrunire, Il gelsomino notturno , and D'Estate . The representation of the Pleiades constellation : numerous small white ceramic flowers, very thin iron stems, clusters of couch grass and midges, vegetal signs that are all grafted between embroidery and transparencies. Variations on the same theme reiterated with words engraved and scratched into the skin of the ceramic. Pascoli-esque poems enclosed, packaged and ordered, sealed, piled up and collected in ceramic boxes. Objects preserved as mnemonic traces, retraced and laid bare, which dialogue with large paintings of naturalistic memory. Obsessions, all of them, which often translate into acts of pure joy. Yet a feeling of incurable “irremediability” also persists. In the background, the large canvas Dentro l'imbrunire (2024). Inside the painting is engraved the words “ dentro l'imbrunire, l'alba ”. To say that it is always Nature – with its seeds, its forms and its eternal returns – that revives day and night, in the becoming of the seasons.

Mirna Manni distributes and distributes her feelings in a highly significant way. By penetrating to the heart of events, history can be relived. Thus, here are objects that transduce and shatter memory and recollections through pure cultural mediation. So, what makes man's despicable barbarity against Nature possible? Always on the brink of possibility, we teeter on the edge of the abyss. This is an artist's taking charge of what happens in the world. The engraved mark thus violates the ceramic material and recounts man's manifest work on defenseless Nature... The Constellations intertwine with elements of the natural world and flourish among stones, cocoons, and banners, the result of the fusion of mysterious psychic accumulations. Symbolic presences in which we can reflect ourselves. Mirna Manni's poetic fury engages and astonishes. A prodigious consistency made of passionate fervor and cultivated imagination. All these works culminate in the proximate enchantment of a vision that is magical mimesis. We are then overcome with amazement and wonder before these canvases woven by unknown hands on ancient looms, now filled with embroidered words, seeds, and flowers, in a blossoming of floral levitations. Ars est celare artem.

A lightness that comes, perhaps, from the innermost soul of Giovanni Pascoli. Mirna Manni manages to blend enigma and frugality. One wonders, then: what and how many thresholds are there between dream and reality, between peaceful balances and violations that man can still cross today? Art is a precious reliquary that preserves light and shadow, spanning centuries and sowing sedimentations, always creating new rhizomatic and protean works. Art, like poetry, projects and conceals entire universes in its mystical silence that encompasses everything. Signs refer us to things, to the small, great things of our daily lives, to our mysterious, hallucinatory, and unreal existence that repeats itself over the centuries. To the ambiguity of life, to man's violent actions against an all-encompassing Mother Nature, Mirna Manni contrasts and offers us evocative emblems of hope. As in the last work that closes the exhibition: Cosmi d'attesa (2017). A diptych made of fireclay and wire. A sort of "spindle," like those described in fairy tales, held in the hands of fairies or witches... to unravel our rebirth.

Certainly, as Gaston Bachelard argued, "imagination only penetrates the imaginary depths" of those who already possess it. For it is desire that drives every dynamism. It is the authentic need to renew and multiply ourselves that triggers our growth. Thus, the aesthetic values we attribute to these works, fertile horizons that Mirna Manni has created, can amplify and expand new worlds for new dreams. For those who still desire to see and listen with the pure voice of the heart.

FROM

Andrea Pompili