Lorenzo Marini, a star of the ad agency world in Italy, launched a new art movement in Milan, now capturing the attention of LA Art Show with great acclaim.

MALIBU, CALIFORNIA , USA , February 17, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- In October of 2016 Lorenzo Marini founded the “Type Art” movement in Milan, Italy. According to his Manifesto, it considers letters as worthy artistic subject matter with the same value as a portrait or landscape. This concept is not radical within the Eastern tradition of calligraphic arts, wherein the brushwork in a handwritten character has a long and painterly tradition of students and masters. However, to the Western mind, the art of language has been associated with the “low arts” of graphic design and advertising. Chinese lettering serves as a secondary leitmotif to the Latin/Roman alphabet in earlier canvases of the Alphatype series.

Bicoastal, binational “Type” artist Lorenzo Marini shattered such Western bias, as he revealed “Raintype,” his latest evolutionary step, a delightful, immersive, whimsical yet sophisticated translucent alphabetic mobile/installation presented by Bruce Lurie Gallery at the 2023 LA Art Show. The LA Art Show runs February 15-19, in the West Hall of the downtown LA Convention Center, adjacent to the Crypto.com Arena.

Lorenzo Marini, who divides his time between Milan, Los Angeles, and New York, has written a “Manifesto for the Liberation of Letters,” in which he declares “Letters are born free, just as humans are social creatures but also individuals.” While Marini’s earlier two-dimensional artworks and installations show letters bound by flatness and imprisoned within the omnipresent grid, in “Raintype,” the grid takes on elements of space and time associated with a hologram, rather than a map, or typesetter’s block.

The effect, in which colorful ABC’s imprinted on clear rectangular shapes hang from the ceiling like raindrops suspended in the air in the middle of a rainy day, evokes not only a childhood nursery, but a child-like fascination with the abstract and aesthetic elements of language. As children, before one may fully understand, or learn to master the nature of language, one may begin to learn to print. Before that, one is introduced to letters, perhaps hanging over a crib, or singing as cartoons on television. As a child, one may have wondered, at least subconsciously, why what Marini calls the “slavery” and “obligation” of letters was necessary. “Letters are our regressive world, our first contact with codified knowledge, and the associated design is the bridge which has accompanied us in the construction of communication,” says Marini. But he adds, “Just as animals are not our food, letters are not our slaves.”

The sleek, clean, structural, and graphic look of Marini’s alphabet forms draws comparisons to Warhol and the Pop Art movement which emerged in the mid-1950’s. Like Andy Warhol, Lorenzo Marini, who was born in Monselice in 1958, began his career in the commercial art world. After graduating with an architecture degree in Venice in 1980, Marini found employment with powerhouse ad agencies including Ogilvy and Leo Burnett. In 1997, Marini founded his own company, Lorenzo Marini & Associati, which has branches in Milan, Turin, and New York.

Success as a commercial artist and entrepreneur was not enough for Lorenzo Marini. He was compelled, like all great artists, to make art without commercial restraints. Intriguingly, Marini worked in secrecy for twenty years. Only in 2014 did he seek a public audience for this work. The response was sensational. After his initial public appearances as an artist in Miami and New York, the Province of Milan held an anthology exhibition of two decades’ worth of work. Within a few short years, he racked up an impressive list of exhibits in European museums (Padua, Florence), international art fairs (Venice Biennial, Art Basel), and critical acclaim—such as critic Peter Frank, who lauds Marini’s “generosity of spirit” and calls his work “approachable and appealing.”

AlphaCube, a previous Lorenzo Marini installation at the 2020 Los Angeles Art Show, toys with the history of the “white cube” in Modernist art, a term that entered the post-modern lexicon with Artforum critic Brian O’Doherty in his 1976 essays wherein he argued that the gallery space had “a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values. Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics.” He turned the value system inside-out, and covered the inside of a stand-alone cube with a wall-to-wall wallpaper effect of ordered yet randomized letters. Marini Fans respond by posing for selfies inside the cube. In “RainType,” conversely, visitors are coaxed not to pose, but to play, and regain some of their innocent wonder.

Meet and greet with the artist in person, at the LA Art Show, at the Bruce Lurie Gallery booth until Sunday, February 19, 2023. Visit: https://www.laartshow.com/

1, https://lorenzomariniarte.com/en/
2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Marini
3, https://www.instagram.com/lorenzo.marini/?hl=en
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Bruce Edwin
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