Lino Mannocci
Storie de Mare (postcards)
31 October - 11 November 2000
Storie de Mare (prints)
13 November - 23 November 2000
LONDON Front Room


    

    

    


Stories of the Sea, the title itself speaks of Lino Mannocci's rapport with the sea and of his continuing nostalgia for the small coastal town of his youth, Viarreggio, to which he returns every summer like a migrating bird.

Mannocci chooses to develop his themes with their metaphorical undertones, using two very different media: The contemporary postcard, a uniquely twentieth century phenomenon; and in contrast traditional drypoint etching with its weight of history, numbering amongst its exponents some of the greatest masters of 15th and 16th centuries. For his postcards, Mannocci deliberately chooses the banal clichéd image and sets out to alter its course according to his inner world. With delicate brush strokes, he tenderly covers up urban ugliness and whimsically isolates the figures so that they become dissolved into a harmonious landscape of ethereal mists. Mannocci has a special attachment to print-making. The author of the definitive catalogue of Claude's print, he is a self-confessed aficionado of the medium, delighting in its vagaries. The breadth of the subject matter of the prints stretches from myths of Christian and pagan antiquity to the mysterious contemporary story of Judith. As in the postcards, the figures appear to be engulfed by a mysterious, often apocalyptic landscape, small presences dissolving into a larger more enduring picture.

Subtlety of texture, delicacy of tone, poetry of purpose, these are characteristics which describe Mannocci's oeuvre. He takes inspiration from Claude and Corot, whose visions of idealised, poetic landscapes bear a strong affinity with his own evocations.