Illustrator and visualiser for major advertising agencies, Filippo Manfroni approached painting driven by communicating through the body, which is entrusted with the task of celebrating the search for the meaning of existence.
Filippo, tell us about yourself and your relationship with painting.
I think it all started from a need to communicate. I have always been fascinated by stories. Reading a book, watching a film, listening to a story means living experiences through the sheer power of imagination. Charmed by all this, after studying art in Urbino I moved to Milan to study comics.
I tried graphic novels, but I realised it was not my path and I took a step back. After all, you cannot make the best of yourself if you persist in pursuing the wrong goal. Afterward I realised that I could be better at condensing a story into an image and since then I have dedicated myself to cultivating this talent with all my energy. And it has not been easy.
What difficulties did you face?
Meanwhile, I had to learn a lot as a self-taught artist. In fact, as I said, I went to art school and comics school where I studied drawing and not painting. So I learnt how to paint by drawing from different sources, by trial and error. I took my cue from paintings that fascinated me, trying to understand how they were made. I watched tutorials explaining how to use the canvas and palette, and so on.
In parallel there was the whole journey to find my own voice. At first I was very inspired by Kent Williams, a graphic novelist who in turn owes a lot to Schiele. After that my painting became emancipated from this need for imitation, and I finally found my own identity as a painter. All this through trial and failure and comebacks, of which I am very proud.
What do you mention in your works?
I describe the human. I tell about people, relationships, moods, passions. Sometimes I am inspired by something I have seen, other times it is about me: my fantasies, my fears, my desires, my ghosts.
My works represent bodies, or parts of bodies. In fact bodies can be depicted in different ways, depending on where you tend. One can tend to enhance their forms and lines, working towards abstraction; or one can tend to tell something, as I do. I try to give a message, to fix an intuition. When I was very young, I needed to find a way to integrate with others. So I started observing them: watching how they behaved, how they moved, how they communicated and related to each other.
I became very good at observing and understanding others, perhaps more than I understand myself. In particular, I am moved by our being so fragile and so tormented by the need to understand why we are here. From this sense of precariousness must, in my opinion, arise gratitude. We must be grateful to be alive. That’s what I like to talk about.
What do you think about Cinquerosso Arte?
I think the works chosen are really of a very high standard, and humanly I am getting on very well. I am of the opinion that we need much more beauty and kindness.
Cinquerosso Arte’s project is fundamental to the first point. Art obviously has high prices, often prohibitive, but the intuition of spreading beauty through images of the highest quality at low prices is certainly a good one.
