'FAME' by Edoardo Manzoni at State Of, Milan

For his Solo Show, Edoardo Manzoni opens a dialogue with the industrial spaces of State Of, a new exhibition space hosted by Aretè Showroom, proposing a series of unpublished works and previous productions related to the world of hunting. Manzoni finds in this ancestral theme a starting point for his recent works, which are part of a wider investigation of the relationship between the natural and the artificial, the human and the animal.
 
His artistic practice is based on a process of continuous recovery and reworking of objects and materials, through different modes of expression such as sculpture, painting and installation, often seeking a dialogue with the world of craftsmen. Disseminated in the exhibition space, the works are presented as elements of primitive and at the same time contemporary design, they seem to be strange furnishing objects or traps to capture animals. Manzoni seeks a parallelism between the figure of the artist and that of the hunter, building an exhibition as a territory of evocative concatenations and blurring the border between work, trap and ornament. The aim seems to be to trigger a tension between the object and the spectator, given by feelings of attraction, seduction and repulsion. On display are a pair of photographic prints representing a hunting scene. The artist intervenes on the print by removing the predator, leaving only the prey and the landscape within the scene. The violence of the trap devices or hunting representations thus seems to be suspended or simply hidden behind the artist's formal ambiguity.