Francesco Urbano Ragazzi
Miltos Manetas
Milano
Torre Rasini, Milano
March 21 - April 20, 2019
Curated by Francesco Maria Gloria Urbano Ragazzi Antonelli Cappelletti
in collaboration with Galleria Valentina Bonomo, Rome
“Milan surely is not a city. It is a condition.” Miltos Manetas, March 2019.
We are in the heart of Milano, at the 4th floor of Torre Rasini, a historical building designed by Emilio Lancia and Giò Ponti in the 1930s which discreetly emerges between the ramparts of Porta Venezia. We look out over the Planetario Ulrico Hoepli and the trees of the Indro Montanelli Garden. All around us, oil-on-canvas landscapes painted by Miltos Manetas.
Representing details that once existed in Milano, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Athens, Rome, Bogotá, these landscapes are urban and yet domestic at the same time. No taste of the city. No sense of home. This is Manetas’s version of Luchino Visconti’s Gruppo di Famiglia in un Interno (Conversation Piece, 1974) in a world where technology became part of the family.
For the very first time, this family of cables painted between 1994 and 2019 is reunited under the same roof. Thanks to the banality of a painting exhibition in a private house, these fragmented lines trace their connections with both history and the present. First of all, the personal history of the artist, who used to live in Milan during the crucial years of his education. Then the history of the artists, curators, collectors, thinkers, activists and other vulnerable people who inhabit this net.
