Inchino

Renata Fabbri is delighted to announce Inchino, a personal project by Edoardo Manzoni, part of the Sotto programme, the gallery project room dedicated to the research and display of emerging artistic languages. For the occasion, the artist presents a series of new sculptural works exploring the concept of the ‘ornament’ as a meeting place between human cultural conventions and the animal world.

Drawing on the rural context familiar to him and on its aesthetic imagery, Manzoni develops his research, which ranges from sculpture to painting and installation. His recent production questions the concepts of seduction and violence, starting from the relationship that men and animals have established through hunting and its complex net of deceptive strategies. His works explore the implicit correlation between the figures of the prey and the predator, highlighting the reversibility of roles in an interplay of reflections and parallelisms that define his entire practice. By evoking traps and e calling devices such as lark decoys, birdcages, snares and whistles, Manzoni creates harmless capturing devices conceived to confront the observer with art’s capacity to act as an aesthetic trick and form of illusionist. Thus underlining the affinity between the artist, the hunter and the magician – roles linked by elements of cunningness and fascination – Manzoni’s works seem to project us into a hunting trip where logic and irrationality, instinct and reason, are intertwined in a malleably ambiguous and latent language.

For Sotto, Manzoni features a series of small sculptures resembling exotic birds, created through the assembly of heterogeneous forms and materials. Presented for the first time to the public, the corpus of works origins from the study of courting techniques and the selection mechanisms that regulate the mating of certain avian species. Among the extravagant rituals carried out by the male bird to attract the partner, we find in fact the display of the plumage, or activities such as singing and dancing: features linked to aesthetic and performative components, on the basis of which the female bird chooses her mate. Taking inspiration from these bizarre phenomena at the origin of the reproduction of the species, Manzoni points out how the sense of beauty may go against the law of fighting and the survival of the strongest, introducing in his research the theme of the ‘ornament’: a decorative element without practical or functional purposes.

Exploring the concept of ornament in the animal realm – as a primary form of defence and seduction – the artist reflects on man’s primordial need to create objects that, beyond their practical use, contribute to the construction of identity and social status. Miming the aesthetic features of these curious birds and by emphasising their most peculiar components, the works on show inhabit the exhibition space in an apparently static choreography, yet one forever on the point of taking form.