biancoscuro
Marcello Morandini
The splendor of the white combined with the depth of the black
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ince the beginning Faithful to the principles of Constructivism, Marcello Morandini has used its limits as a skeleton of his creations.. In his production, it is clear that everything comes from a single project, developed both as a sculptural work, as a design or architectural work: the opposites alternate in pressing rhythms, always extremely controlled even if projecting the infinite. Vincenzo Chetta: I feel a certain emotion to talk with you, over fifty years of career always in the name of consistency and rigour ... What were your first steps? Marcello Morandini: Artistically I was born in the early sixties, in a Milanese environment full of continuous comparisons with the emerging industry. The first exhibitions in the Galleria San Fedele, at the Galleria del Deposito in Genoa and at the Naviglio in Milan: important stages that led me to the invitations of the Biennial of S. Paulo in Brazil at the 1968 Venice Biennale with a personal room with the presentation of Gillo Dorfles in the catalog. Unfortunately those were times of protests and protests, with me only Colombo and a few others tried to safeguard our important goal, which despite everything was still a precious event in our artistic life. Then came the proposals from Switzerland and many museum exhibitions in Germany (areas where I lived a lot of my life); Singapore, Tokyo, Documenta of Kassel and again the Biennale in the eighties, Malaysia in the nineties ... There would be too much to tell! V.C.: It was in the 1980s that you started collaborating with schools and universities; what did you leave this experience? M.M.: Eventually, and to me surprise, I be-
Scultura 552, 2009, legno laccato b/n, cm 247x62x26
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by Vincenzo Chetta
came aware that the person who most benefited from these meetings was myself, constantly forced to bring out the best of me, in order to find solutions to the thousand of questions. A workout, certainly important for my work which otherwise, in my studio, I alone would have been absolutely unable to do. V.C.: Artist, designer, architect: your skills and talents touch on these three “spheres”, each part of the other. How do you combine them? M.M.: Art is knowledge and cultural enrichment; Architecture is habitat and utopia; Design is ergonomics, function, identity. My work is given by the union of these experiences, all equally important and fundamental. V.C.: What has fuelled your passion for this world throughout your career? M.M.: Every project, even the smallest one, is constantly aimed at understanding and knowing what we don’t always see. I find it really exalting to discover that “nothing” hides the “everything” and that the eyes see only what the mind wants them to see. We live hours, days, always looking at the same things, always living in the same places without really and thoroughly knowing them, letting ourselves for the whole life be absorbed by the same emotions to the point that we dream of others in unknown places, not thinking that our imagination and our eyes could anywhere always propose new emotions. In this I find the gratifying morale of my work: discovering that what is obvious is surprising and that it can have and embody the form of life. V.C.: If you also use primary colors in design, use only black and white for your sculptures, where does this intuition come from? M.M.: In Art I use black and white, like a handwriting on a sheet, where to read and understand no other added chromatic value is necessary and the form has the only way to
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