Soledad (urbana), 2018

Renato Manzoni  

The work developed by Renato Manzoni (1945) is a symbiotic fruit of his technical training in architecture, industrial design and graphics, as well as humanism, in areas such as theology and meta-psychics. 

His self-taught foray into sculpture began early with his father, later he continued in various artists' workshops until reaching the Atelier Saint Luc in Paris, where he specialized in traditional Byzantine iconography. Manzoni's public career begins in Barcelona (Spain) in the world of conceptual, abstract and symbolist art of the 70s of the last century. At the height of material informalism and op-art, Renato Manzoni was already a very active figure in the Catalan avant-garde art circles. Critics of the time described him as a multidisciplinary artist, an integrationist of sculpture, painting and architecture. And they added "beautiful architecture-sculptures, not only for the purity of the geometric construction, but also for the light."

Critics recognized him with the Signal-70 award. Committed to the dissemination of art, Manzoni was director of an avant-garde art gallery in Barcelona, critic and essayist at Editorial Dopesa and Grupo Mundo, curator for the Barcelona City Council of the Modern Art Meetings in the Metro and curator for Spain from the Italia 2000 awards of the Fondazione Bombelli of Naples. At the end of the 1980s, his works lost physical and material volume to acquire it visually. They are paintings with a fractal aesthetic that are reminiscent of mathematical models, works framed in the Neo-Geo (Neo-Geometric-Conceptualism) movement.

He simultaneously investigates ancient artistic techniques, in particular Byzantine egg painting on panel, and the aesthetics of Occitan-Catalan Romanesque lime frescoes, from which the execution of various icons and murals emerged. In the 90s, with the rise and generalization of PCs, Manzoni began to use the computer for professional purposes in the field of architecture and design. His artistic work also delves into the digital world, however preserving both its pictorial character and its architectural design and even conceptual proposal.