MANUALE PER GIOVANI ARTISTI

Andrea Mastrovito

I accomplished this 26 portraits series in two sessions. 22 in 2007 summer, the other 4 in 2009 spring, these last for 2009 fall/winter Kris Van Assche’s advertising campaign (and here i drew myself much more hotter, besides I had to look like a model – pretty tough matter). At the beginning they just should be little reverse “fioretti”, inverting the topic of Franciscan “fioretti” (one of the first drawings is actually mocking Giotto’s Sermon to the Birds, replacing birds with paper planes), or rather little meaningless – but at the same time – essential miracles: biting a shark in open sea, scaring Count Dracula, drawing the sun in the sky, planting flower books in the ground… But more and more that the work was progressing, I realized that I was dealing, actually, with an handbook, drown in Hokusai’s mangas style: a survival handbook for artists, an interpreting key of reality that allowed me to create a link between the ideas I had and what I wanted to do. So, a lot of these drawings, between 2007 and 2009, became a starting point for a lot of big installations, from Eine Symphonie des Grauens to Robespierre, from The Origin od the species to several collages to arrive to Enciclopaedia of Garden Flowers that is inspired by the drawing where, tearing pages from a botany book, I saw them in the ground, waiting for them to grow. In this exibition, for the first time, these 26 drawings are shown to the audience: I think this is an important viaticum for the exibition. Being disposed in the two room next to the entrance, they discreetly invite the public to enter in touch with my most secret and intimate world, showing all the things that are at the base of my last years work, following Testori’s method, according to wich he used to sorround himself of all the paintings he found of a given artist and, then, understanding the life, the desires and the passions just through his painting, his (de)sign.