Astragalo Sculpture

Manuel Grosso, born in Gorizia in 1974, has an artistic-philosophical background. He has always had a strong bond with art, starting to draw from an early age. The interest in artistic expression led him to attend art therapy courses and to carry out, for twenty years, art teaching projects for children and adults. In Romans d’Isonzo, in the province of Gorizia, he opened "Maninarte", a studio that deals with raising public awareness of the themes of creativity and culture through workshops, meetings, conferences, exhibitions. He has exhibited in several group and solo exhibitions, including, in 2017 Fragmenta at Circoloquadro in Milan, curated by Ivan Quaroni, and Unaltra Primavera in 2019 at Castello Oldofredi, near Bergamo, curated by Giuseppe Frangi. In the same year he was selected for the YICCA Award in Milan and in March 2020 he created the cover for the magazine “Arbiter”. In his research, Manuel Grosso loves to explore the most varied mediums and for about fifteen years he has developed a unique and personal technique, which he has refined over time and which he has called "tear". The name refers to the method that was used for the conservation of ancient frescoes when they had to be detached from the original location. The artist searches the territory for traces, footprints, textures, passages of human and animal lives, buried and abandoned objects, with the idea of ​​describing the earth's surface not through a graphic or pictorial representation, but by directly "tearing" the volumes, the details of the shapes with casts made of polyurethane and different materials such as fabric, wood, cardboard. This innovative process is carried out both in natural contexts, such as the undergrowth, the shoreline, the river bed, and in artificial, urban environments, on portions of concrete, asphalt, pavements, walls. The artist intervenes in the studio at a later time, crystallizing the reliefs made with epoxy resins. Finally he uses monochrome glazes, made up of acrylic pigments that often turn towards blue. This color is chosen both because it allows to lighten and make the heaviness of the material delicate, and as a symbol of the shades of the sky which, reflecting on the earth, reflect the unity between the micro and the macro cosmos.