The appearance and the rule
Florio Magnanini
(Italiano)
What a precise and sharp graphic sign – as the one in the brand created in the Eighties by Maurizio Marinelli for Zadi s.p.a. – has to do with the flowing and apparently anarchist chromatic weave of the pictorial series from 1 to 10 called TRD, set for the large conference room in Zadi’s new head office in Carpi?
Little or nothing, one could answer. At least, if one remains on the surface of easy contrapositions: the order giving way to chaos, for instance; or a research of meaning (the extreme symbolization of a lock) overwhelmed in the paintings by a signifier that proceeds according to a logic (or a non-logic) of its own. But it’s never like that in the authors’ lives. At most, there are evolutions, but there aren’t sharp breaks between expressive periods. Here there’s not a colour to label a period with (as it is usual in the history of arts), because as regards Marinelli you must speak of the permanence of basic colours: black, yellow, blue and red. These are the printing colours, put against a white backdrop that reminds the love for the paper; they’re not blended in the four-colour process but they are contemporaneous, expertly matched and interlaced as if they stress the beat of a jazz musicality. So here they are again, the rigour and the graphic rule: definitely there’s not an evolution towards chaos. Marinelli, as a graphic designer and as an artist, keeps on stressing his rational and calculated way of good a communicator, who disdains the pedantries and the grammar rules of the expressiveness, but on the other hand, who absorbs all its nimbleness. It’s a feeling that expresses itself in lightness and that seems to tell you “See? It’s like this, but it could be even its contrary”. In the end, it’s always the forms’ game, sly, smiling, manipulated with the utmost technical mastery, that prevails on everything. In the end it offers itself as an uninterrupted trompe l’oeil, an alternation of appearances revealed in the reality and of realities faded in the appearances, that led us too, who know him and love him, to ask ourselves:
“Who is really Maurizio Marinelli?”.
Florio Magnanini
(Italiano)
What a precise and sharp graphic sign – as the one in the brand created in the Eighties by Maurizio Marinelli for Zadi s.p.a. – has to do with the flowing and apparently anarchist chromatic weave of the pictorial series from 1 to 10 called TRD, set for the large conference room in Zadi’s new head office in Carpi?
Little or nothing, one could answer. At least, if one remains on the surface of easy contrapositions: the order giving way to chaos, for instance; or a research of meaning (the extreme symbolization of a lock) overwhelmed in the paintings by a signifier that proceeds according to a logic (or a non-logic) of its own. But it’s never like that in the authors’ lives. At most, there are evolutions, but there aren’t sharp breaks between expressive periods. Here there’s not a colour to label a period with (as it is usual in the history of arts), because as regards Marinelli you must speak of the permanence of basic colours: black, yellow, blue and red. These are the printing colours, put against a white backdrop that reminds the love for the paper; they’re not blended in the four-colour process but they are contemporaneous, expertly matched and interlaced as if they stress the beat of a jazz musicality. So here they are again, the rigour and the graphic rule: definitely there’s not an evolution towards chaos. Marinelli, as a graphic designer and as an artist, keeps on stressing his rational and calculated way of good a communicator, who disdains the pedantries and the grammar rules of the expressiveness, but on the other hand, who absorbs all its nimbleness. It’s a feeling that expresses itself in lightness and that seems to tell you “See? It’s like this, but it could be even its contrary”. In the end, it’s always the forms’ game, sly, smiling, manipulated with the utmost technical mastery, that prevails on everything. In the end it offers itself as an uninterrupted trompe l’oeil, an alternation of appearances revealed in the reality and of realities faded in the appearances, that led us too, who know him and love him, to ask ourselves:
“Who is really Maurizio Marinelli?”.
