Twenty years after the artist’s death and more than forty years since his last exhibition in an Italian public institution, the MAN Museum announces a long-overdue tribute to one of the most radical, fascinating, and complex protagonists of visual research in Sardinia during the second half of the twentieth century.
Born in Cagliari in 1940, Mazzarelli was a sophisticated painter and an acute theorist. He entrusted his most important artistic legacy to three volumes, brought together under the title Il Libro Bianco, whose drafting began in the late 1980s.
After 1993—the year of the premature death of his daughter Ada, to whom the book is dedicated — Mazzarelli devoted himself exclusively to this inexhaustible project, pursuing it in almost total and painful isolation until his death in 2006.
Entirely handwritten, illuminated, and hand-illustrated, Il Libro Bianco is a monumental, titanic, obsessive work, an almost hemorrhagic stream of consciousness, yet governed by absolute method and precision.
Created according to a rigorous formal and compositional structure, the work contains Mazzarelli’s artistic, philosophical, and theoretical journey, distilled with the support of an entire editorial team of alter egos, each devoted to formulating axioms and theorems connected to the very foundations of composition, to the freedom and necessity of creation, to first principles, space and time, and to the eternal dichotomies between form and void.
Il Libro Bianco represents the culmination of an artistic journey and a radical way of life that spanned the major cultural and political events of the second half of the twentieth century.
Particularly significant are the two extreme events that mark the stages of this journey: the two artist burnings. The first took place in 1970, when he destroyed all the work he had produced up to that point. The second occurred in 1996, when, once again, he felt the need to sever his ties drastically with the past, setting fire to hundreds of canvases and thousands of sheets of paper, and thus embarking on a new and final chapter in his exploration of the concept of the total work of art.
The exhibition thus reveals, for the first time, the enduring relevance of his thinking, shaped by intellectual refinement and emancipated experimentation, bringing to the fore the stature of an extraordinary figure in the art world—not only in Sardinia, but in Italy as a whole.
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Curated by Chiara Gatti, based on a project by Elisabetta Masala.
With a contribution by Alessandro Biggio, as visiting artist.
Coordination by Rita Moro.
Special thanks to Giulia Mazzarelli.
Additional thanks to:
Montecristo Project for the text “Luigi Mazzarelli. Una teoria del trauma”.
Centro Man Ray for the video “Al di qua e al di là della morte dell’arte”.