Born in Alghero the August 23th 1969, Chicco Mannazzu has studied in Rome where he graduated in Architecture. He lives and works in Alghero devoting himself to the profession of architect and passion for art. His work is a response to the growing need to give life to inner feelings and memories related to his personal experience, realizing intense moments, impressions and memories, returning, to the gaze, aesthetic objects by strong emotionality. The process of investigation and experimentation and the ability to read in the rough material the future potential, offers new expressive possibilities and techniques in media that have been deprived of theirs own functionality. Giving form to the formless, Chicco Mannazzu, manages to convey aesthetic meaning in materials and objects devoid of artistic value but rich of its own memory. From wire to wood, from sand to fabric, from mud to iron, everything is able to suggest past histories that, remodeled, are able to satisfy the need to communicate moments and emotions of everyday life. It’s evident his continuous search for formal de-construction, to eliminate the superfluous to achieve a unique concept. It affects in every work the elegance, the heritage of sensitivity, the power of observation and the obvious experience of media and used materials.
Dialogue with the shapes and technical testing are the guidelines of of Chicco Mannazzu’s work. The predilection for synthetic materials, created for planning or furnishing purposes, is meditated with the creative and technical act, hence the composition of the object receives energy in the act of adaptation to the supporting surface, the board rather than the canvas, giving vibration and stress. The author does not translate colors or shapes, or at least it isn’t the aim of his work, but the liquid element seamless. The rubbery surface intercepts and enhances the plasticity of faint movements, bradyseisms, by their nature almost imperceptible, in which evolution, sometimes, breaks the sign or the anthropomorphic figure. The study and the influence of Piero Manzoni are evident, who chosed, as his favorite materials, kaolin and cotton for its “Achromes”, and Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi who started a course of study and analysis of the possibilities provided by the extroversion of the canvas through the use of nails and ribs and silhouettes of wood and metal inserted behind the canvas. Chicco Mannazzu continues with its dialectical peculiarities in the wake of this research.
