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Streams: A Visual Diary

Summer 2015
Summer 2015
:
Volume
30
, Number
1
Article starts on page
8
.

Italian artist Roberto Mannino works in sculpture, relief, printmaking, and installation. He started working in handmade paper in 1995, and committed to the medium after meeting the Koretskys and Amanda Degener in 1996. As an art educator, he has taught at various US colleges abroad, such as Cornell, Temple, Loyola, and Rhode Island School of Design, in Rome where he lives, and has taught workshops on 3D and relief papermaking in the US at Dieu Donné, Cooper Union, Maryland Institute College of Art, Pyramid Atlantic, and at various institutions throughout Europe.  Drawing is a sort of daydreaming for me and an important way to think through the unfolding of big projects, like the one I just completed—a permanent installation in the Palazzo Poli. Built in 1720, this grand public building overlooks the famous Trevi Fountain. The fountain waters originate from below the Palazzo Poli, where an ancient Roman aqueduct, the Aqua Virgo, still carries water into the city from a pure source 13 kilometers away. The Palazzo Poli is also the home of the National Cabinet of Prints and Paper and its impressive collection of over 110,000 prints, 23,000 copper engraving plates, and 25,000 master drawings.

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The humongous scale of the conference hall (50 x 50 x 60 feet) required an equivalent, large-scale installation. Due to a series of delays in receiving official approval for the project, I had a mere four months to produce and install the piece. The final project consists of three sculptural works, floating in the Hall: the Scenario, the Tre Vele, and the Sybil. Drawing kept me sane under the pressure. The storm of ideas, sketches, scale models, workplans, recipes for fiber cocktails, progress reports on the paper shrinkage, and the long lists of mounting logistics flowed from my pen onto paper. The drawings tell the story of my creative process, the anxieties, the sense of responsibility, the challenges and triumphs, the excitement. And water, water, water streamed from the Palazzo Poli, to the Trevi Fountain, into my studio, down to the bone, and into the paper.