Francesco Manetti

Born in Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, September the 13, 1982, Francesco Manetti grew up devoted to Art, especially the visual arts. Since he was a child he nurtured a love for drawing and painting, for graphics and illustration. At the age of 20 he started composing his first works with greater dedication and in-depth research, strongly inspired by the work of contemporary masters such as Jean Michel Basquiat, Mark Rothko, Jean Dubuffet, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly, just to name the most important. At the age of 23 he started studying visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara (Italy), where he developed that combination of techniques and disciplines that then characterized his future artistic project. In his early artistic career, parallel to the painting, he dedicated a particular attention to the world of illustration, to which he dedicated his degree thesis, which took place in 2010. He has worked assiduously in the field of illustration collaborating with various publishing houses specialized in illustrated books for children. At the same time, he has carried on his pictorial project, through collective and solo exhibitions, in a constant evolutive “work in progress” that has led him to his actual artistic way based on the abstract expressionism style, a fertile ground for a totally free artistic and existential expression. 

In his artworks Francesco Manetti brings together everything that he assimilates in everyday life, both in visual, auditory and emotional terms. This constant tangle of elements is abstractly translated and visually synthesized by him into images that are deliberately not figurative, but visually poetic. Codes and mappings of the surrounding world summarized in layered emotions that become gesture and color. Delicacy and rude gesture. The call of beauty, through color, composing by contrast. It is the search for the balance between order and chaos that drives him to create paintings. 

Francesco Manetti mainly works with acrylic painting on canvas, that is prepared with a first layer of plaster that represents a real first step in the creation of the artwork. The plaster makes the canvas a more processable surface that can be carved, ribbed, consumed: it's like to give it a “first level of soul”. The artworks then acquires the other “soul's levels” with a stratification of multiple layers, where each one of them represents a different step in the completion of the work: an intricate combination of colors, marks and scratches that goes to compone the unique and final body of the opera.

PAST EXHIBITIONS

2023 | Impronte d’Arte part II, Duepuntozero art gallery, Bergamo, Italy (collective exhibition)

2022 | Impronte d’Arte part I, Duepuntozero art gallery, Bergamo, Italy (collective exhibition)

2022 | Art.Box.Project Palma 1.0, Casa del Arte, Palma de Maiorca, Spain (collective exhibition)

2022 | Open Art, Art Number 23 art gallery, Barcelona, Spain (collective exhibition)

2022 | Biennale di Vercelli, Studio 256 art gallery, Vercelli, Italy (collective exhibition) 

2013 | Gipsy Art, Gipsy House Casa del Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina (collective exhibition)

2012 | La Noce a Tre Canti art gallery, Pietrasanta, Italy (personal exhibition)

2007 | Brainstorming art festival, Fortezza Vecchia, Livorno, Italy (collective exhibition)

2007 | Effetto Refugio, Officina Refugio art gallery, Livorno, Italy (collective exhibition)

2006 | Pollock art gallery, Pisa (PI), Italy (collective exhibition)

2006 | Effetto Refugio, Officina Refugio art gallery, Livorno, Italy (collective exhibition)

2005 | Efetto Venezia art festival, Livorno, Italy (collective exhibition)

CONTACTS.

Official instagram channel: francescomanetti_paintings

Inquiries/collaborations: [email protected]

WHERE TO BUY MY ART.

TRiCERA

Saatchi

Kaleido

Art Boxy

“Sooner or later we'll be soon or late”. 2022. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino.

“I tell you what you have to do: follow your instinct (oxymoron)”. 2022. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino.

“Tell me how you feel but i don't wanna know it (hypocrisy)”. 2022. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In the constant search for strong contrasts, a particular dedication goes to hypocrisy. Hypocrisy can emerge in the most unexpected moments and ways. In some ways, it can also bring with it a touch of irony, so much is the absurdity that in some circumstances it brings with it. A game of opposites, a short circuit of nonsense, like putting together two concepts that are the polar opposite of the other.

“It is not. Never. Too. Late”. 2022. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino.

“Spontaneous non Spontaneous”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

In my pictorial work, I am accompanied by music and nature. The painting was created surrounded by the forests of Trentino, by white snowy landscapes, by the contrast between the silence of the mountain environment and the syncopated tension of jazz music. 

“The wait (all i can do is)”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

“Till i die (tribute)”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

“Memories from a sunset (Cadiz Summer)”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting and plaster on canvas.

“Growing”. 2020. 70cm x 100cm. Acrylic painting, paper collage and plaster on canvas.

“Fall”. 2020. 60cm x 80cm. Acrylic paining and paper collage on canvas.

“Blue Night”. 2020. 60cm x 80cm. Acrylic painting and paper collage on canvas. 

“Where i left off”. 2020. 80cm x 60cm. Acrylic painting and paper collage on canvas.