Manfredo Massironi (Padova 1937 - 2011), debuted in the art world in the late fifties. After a short period devoted to painting in 1959 he forward to the Jury of San Fedele (Milan) prize a work in a corrugated cardboard, a kind of ready-made made by the juxtaposition of simple cardboard packaging industry. The result is a controversy on the admission to the exhibition of the work (in particular it was defensed by Lucio Fontana, part of that same committee), which leads to the resignation of the chairman of the jury and this matter had important echo in the press.
Soon it begin to emerge the objectives of visual research of Massironi: overcoming the tendency, which was dominant, of Informal, not through the production of "pictures" but with visual objects that retrieve the concepts of form and geometry, reconnecting to experience constructivist neoplastic and concrete.
In 1960, together with Alberto Biasi, Edoardo Landi, Toni Costa and Ennio Chiggio gives life to the En Group, one of the first experiments aimed at creating creative works are signed and collectively. With Biasi he was the exponent Biasi from the point of theoretically. A spirit of intelligent provocation, which targets the art system and the myths associated with the figure of the artist, becomes a component of the Group's initiatives, which will soon be inserted fully into the international movement of _egg trend. < br>
In the exhibition of 1962, presented by Umberto Eco at the Olivetti shop, it was born the term Arts program designed to summarize the various terms of the trend, which was alternately referred to as kinetic art, visual search, Gestalt art etc. .. It was in those early sixties that Manfredo Massironi brought his interest to a systematic study to the perceptual mechanisms that regulate the activity of seeing, strategically oriented and encouraged through the work, and integrated as the ideal completion of itself. The elements of form, light, movement (real and virtual) are investigated in works that exhibit the very nature and design of the case, and using visual aids such as optical illusion, amodal completion, the abnormal shapes.
The first half of the sixties saw a rapid spread of international _egg Trend: En Group, in particular, participated in Venice Biennale in 1964 and a large group exhibitions in towns such as Zagreb, San Marino, Paris and New York. At the end of 1964 the group experience ends with bitter realism because the artists have taken note of the end of utopia work-related experience and collective creative market capacity to metabolize and led off the ideological and destabilizing of all avant-garde art. < br>
Massironi. at the end of the sixties, devoted himself instead to the side of his scientific research, more and more directed studies on the psychological aspects of visual perception and begins a dense teaching professor of general psychology at the University of Bologna, Rome and finally Verona. Next to the task of teaching, individual continues to develop the characteristic features of his artistic research, which becomes in effect on the expressive side of the parallel scientific research.
His mature works are more playful highlights a component, but always equally guided by the studies on reading in terms of Gestalt, which displaces the habits of the user against the art object, but also denied examined in what are, by convention, its structural elements or content, such as the surface, the frame the possibility of representation. Massironi works on subjects such as emptiness, transparency, silence (always potentially present) by his works gradually gain weight and the possibility of aesthetic fascination, even under the new attention given to color. The extensive research on the topic of "node" built on its elusive and complex structural, seems to sum up different aspects of Massironi latest search was suspended between play, deceive the eye, geometry and possible metaphors.
On March 18, 2011: the fiftieth anniversary of the historic event in which the Group N showed the world: "Arte č pane… pane č arte". On that occasion, Luigi Barzini jr., in a famous article published in the Corriere della Sera, June 18, 1961 entitled "Arte e salame" he wondered: to what the art will extent? Piero Manzoni, two months later, tributes to the Padua group with his "Achrome" of breads and kaolin, recently auctioned at Christie's in hundreds of thousands of euro.
The artists of the Group N (Alberto Biasi, Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi, Manfredo Massironi) were the undisputed protagonists of Programmed and Kinetic art.
On 30 November 2011, in Padua, Manfredo Massironi exponent of the kinetic-visual died. He was 74. Sick since time, Massironi died in the hospital of the city.
On 2012 the exibition “Programmare l’arte. Olivetti e le Neoavanguardie cinetiche” at Olivetti shop in Piazza San Marco Venice from 30/08 to 14/10. |
