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Andrea Mangione is a young Italian artist who doesn’t like to be defined by a technique but rather embraces many of them. His reserved and quiet gaze is what strikes first. From his fascination with domestic and urban settings, Mangione’s subject is the “non subject”. The intimate portrayal of a meditated observation manages to capture the indefinite, giving birth to that which is marginally hidden. In every production he engages in a soft, malleable and sinuously precise representation. Attracted by the shadings generated by techniques such as pencil and oil painting, he creates works that narrate a personal journey happening in some unknown time and space, allowing the freedom for subtle and calm interpretation.
Evoquing the words of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, Andrea Mangione’s work becomes a muffled trip in which the gaze slides through reality, which eludes and rapidly fades away: one has only the time to capture dispersed moments, whose story is to be completely imagined by the construction of baggage where reality and imagination are part of the same path.
“What is that feeling that comes when you drive away and see people getting farther and farther in the distance up to the point where they seem to become tiny spots and fade away? – it is too big of a world that overwhelms us, it’s goodbye. Meanwhile we project ourselves forward towards a new and crazy adventure under the sky.”
Jack Kerouac
Andrea Mangione is among the artists proposed by Artwort Gallery.
When did you approach art for the first time and what were your first experiments?
I was raised in a family which was close to art and culture and they have always encouraged my interests and my curiosity. Around 2005 I started reproducing with crayons fragments of images. They were framings of cities, cars, some interns, marginal and often blurred details that I found in magazines and newspapers around the house. The choice depended on the suggestions certain scraps gave me, attracting me up to the point of making me want to reproduce them. It was a way of being able to dwell in those images through the whole time of their execution. This intuitive mode, based on the perception of awe, is still the center of a process that was developed in continuous variations along the way.
How has the way you look at things changed up to this day?
In a certain way it has remained the same. I think the gaze is like character, it defines itself in time, but there are innate components that cause you to choose some things instead of others. Later come cultural experiences that in time broaden and refine cognitive possibilities. I’m always searching for new solutions to communicate the way I look at things.
In your works one can sense a reserved, intimate glance. What subjects fascinate you and which one has moved you the most?
I’m fascinated by spaces in an urban context and the images they produce. I believe that the subject is not important in itself, what matters is the process through which the work is performed, which becomes interesting when one is able to balance calm and awe.
How much of your research comes from imagination and how much from the perception of reality?
Adherence to objective reality can be very little interesting, it is that which comes between you and your vision that comes to play and creates new meanings. Even though for me reality remains sacred in its forms: a tree is a tree, a road is a road, I’m interested in its emotional underground, that which can establish a dialogue with my imagination and with my state of mind.
The scenes portrayed place themselves in a world that is “out of frame” pierced by a furtive glance on a trip. How true is this interpretation and what are the trips that left a mark on your research?
I consider the “out of frame” allusion as a quality of framing itself, that is, a capacity of evoquing something that is materially absent. In the personal relationship I kept with objective reality, I’ve always sensed the need for an alignment with a visual axis capable of connecting appearance and its interpretation.
There are no specific trips that left a mark on me, the trip is in itself a metaphor for searching. One travels in the diversity of cultural exchanges, in the opening of new spaces, in the questions that may arise. Rather than a collection of souvenirs seen as trophies of places one has visited, it is always one’s own centrality that is to be discovered in relation to the world. Only in this relationship with oneself it is possible to transform the places one has been to into experience.
In one of your texts you wrote “To prefer a given technique might mean to diminish the expressive possibilities of others; towards each one that I employ, I feel attraction, curiosity and desire for deepening”. Provide an annotated list of the techniques you use and what attracts you in each one of those.
I like the fine dust grid of pencil drawing, the opaque density of oil painting, the malleability and softness of crayon, the intuitive speed that digital media offers, the flow of the animated image.
A signature in your works is the softness of the lines leaving the beholder with a sense of indefiniteness, a fog that clouds vision and allows for imagination. What is the indefinite for you?
Something that clouds itself to give way to sensation, intuitive truths that one might lose sight of if things were more concretely defined.
In addition, the indefinite can be underlining something that is apparently marginal and secondary.
What other projects do you have besides your personal artistic research?
I actively engage in the making of works that interact with the surroundings, whether in public spaces or in private contexts, signed by my brother under the alias Gummy Gue. In 2013 I started with some friends a project called Ritmo, which presents the works of artists that operate in various sectors of the visual arts. I am also studying to become a teacher.
What are you working on and what will be the next technique you will employ?
I am currently working on these figures that walk on the street, they’re unknown dwellers of some cities. The subjects are chosen during searches on Google Street View and painted using oil on white paper. It seems that this removal from their context, allied with the positioning of these figures in the lower part of the paper, creates the effect of an ideal resting surface. Furthermore, the figures express the character of the cities in which they live, so far Tokyo, New York and London, and emanate their identities. Another aspect that interests me is the possibility of applying a kind of painting that wasn’t present in my work before, an adherence to reality not yet experimented with.
