Danilo Melandri

Paesaggi minimi

A cahier with 23 pen and ink drawings.

Introduction by Franco Bertoni
 
28 pages

Size: 24x16.5 cm.

With maniacal patience as a miniaturist Melandri is dedicated, between naiveté and awareness, to a singular introspection work, from which emerge both the distant times of childhood, lived with a pastoral love for nature and the small things of everyday life, and the upsets tried in the face of a modernity identified with heavy, destructive machinism and the bearer of death.
 
And Melandri sings things that have disappeared or disappeared and, after all, poetry.

The graphic sign of Melandri, as in other masters of inner narration, is unconventional and individualistic, minute and descriptive: closer to the harsh and free expressions of children and the mentally ill (even in the contamination of figurative details with writing) captivating estetizations. The unease experienced by Melandri in the face of reality translates into small-sized and fragile works by matter which corresponds to a similarly microscopic, fragmented, disarticulated and irreducible representation to any conventional possibility of synthesis. Next to the childhood church, in his drawings, human forms appear small and black as ants, the train that stretches out of all proportion, small cemeteries that welcome memories of vines, cypresses that incline to the breath of the wind, houses and human artifacts that they are deformed in the eyes of the child who sees them in a daze. The human and the divinity coexist. Everything is transformed into a vision as unlikely as plausible.