In the works of Lorenzo Marini the letters of the alphabet are isolated, colored and recomposed: to count are their form and the space they occupy, before the words they could build. It is the principle of TypeArt, the research that the Italian artist and designer presented at the Gallery Anderson Smith in Atlanta as part of Made in Italy Expo.
The participation of Marini was part of the program of the event dedicated to Italian companies and culture, with initiatives and presentations ranging from technology to design, from fashion to food. The Expo, supported by JAS Worldwide, has distributed its appointments on several days and places in the city, putting together business activities and events open to the public.
To understand the work exhibited in Atlanta, you must start from Marini’s experience in visual communication. Those who design a brand or advertising campaign also work on the appearance of letters: their thickness, proportions, distance between character and other. Marini focused his artistic research on these elements, treating each letter as an autonomous subject. In 2017 he collected this idea in the Manifesto for the liberation of letters, a ten-point text that proposes to remove the characters to the task of composing words and observing their geometry.
A few weeks before the Atlanta appointment, on September 11, Marini presented 21 silk dresses during the New York fashion week, each dedicated to a letter from the Italian alphabet. The passage to the fabric introduced a variation: bending and following the movement of the body, the design continually changed appearance. In an interview with Hestetika, Marini pointed out that the clothes were not for sale and that he considered the parade a different way of exposure of his work.
In Atlanta, the inaugural evening curated by Valentina Vidali developed this relationship between the works and the different ways of showing them. The work on display in the gallery added the clothes and a video mapping installation, a technique that adapts the images projected to the shape of the surfaces that receive them. The compositions of Marini could thus be observed on the canvas, worn or reproduced on a larger scale in architecture. “We wanted visitors to experience Lorenzo’s artistic language in different dimensions,” Vidali explained, citing the work on movement, light and projections.
According to Anderson Smith, owner of the gallery, several works were purchased during the inauguration. In the report published by the organizers, Smith stressed above all the choice of supporting the usual exhibition in gallery fashion and digital tools, involving the public through more forms of presentation of the same work.
Marini described the reception received in Atlanta through the relationship with visitors and with those who bought the works: «To see collectors establish a personal connection with the works and choose to bring some in their lives is one of the greatest satisfactions that an artist can receive». The stage in Georgia followed the experimentation presented in New York: the same repertoire of letters passed from the surface of the paintings to the fabric of the clothes and the dimensions of the projections.
L’articolo Lorenzo Marini brought his letters to Atlanta to watch proviene da IlNewyorkese.
