Demystifying Modern Art
11 9 2016
Demystifying Modern Art

Manzoni, Pollock, Klein and Fausto explained by Fausto Gilberti

In 2014, while researching topics for a new book, the author and illustrator Fausto Gilberti travelled to Milan to see an exhibition dedicated to Piero Manzoni, and he had the idea to write and draw about a group of artists who have had little written about them in literature, who are still misunderstood. With this series of books, the artist wanted to break down the wall of incomprehension that stand between modern art and the general public.

In his event at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Gilberti read from his books and showed his images: his stories are filled with irony because, for him, it is important that you "enjoy what you're reading". He chooses a different interpretation for each book, studying the lives and works of the various artists. He reduces the text to the pure essentials, with the images doing the work of the words.

(caricamento...)

The first book that he presents is dedicated to Piero Manzoni, the father of conceptual art. With his most famous work, Artist's Shit, he generated curiosity, allowing us to imagine the unimaginable, because what was actually inside the box wasn't important, more the idea of what it contained When discussing Jackson Pollock, a revolutionary artist but a painter in the traditional sense, Gilberti chose a more playful tone, imagining the various ways how one could paint "on the go".

(caricamento...)

Yves Klein was famous for his intangible works, he painted with water, air and fire, in this case, letting the elements create the works. He even exhibited emptiness, naming the spaces Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility.

Marcel Duchamp, considered the most important artist of the 20th century, defined his art as "ready-made". His speciality, so to speak, was to take objects that already had a function in real life and take them out of their context. This is what happened with the work Fountain, the urinal, or L.H.O.O.Q, the Mona Lisa with a moustache and beard. Critics have run riot in an attempt to interpret his works. The final artist tackled by Gilberti is Lucio Fontana, whose Spatial Concepts, "cuts" on a canvas, were famously interpreted as windows on infinity.