The wait (all i can do is) Painting

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”.