BodyType, la mostra del guru pubblicitario Lorenzo Marini. "Omaggio a Ertè"

BodyType, the exhibition by advertising guru Lorenzo Marini. "A Tribute to Erté"

BodyType, the exhibition by Lorenzo Marini, inspires the summer of Forte dei Marmi from July 13th to August 31st.

One of the greatest Italian and international advertising gurus (with over 500 awards won in a forty-year career), Marini, who has a background in artistic studies and a degree in Architecture from Venice, is showcasing 16 works that explore the body as language, offering 16 points of reflection for those who spend some time between culture and art at the Oblong Contemporary Gallery (located at Via Carducci 14).

"Marini, founder of TypeArt and author of the Manifesto for the Liberation of Letters (2017), combines photography, digital graphics, and pictorial signs to create 'body-letters.'" These represent the social sedimentation of the physical body and the geometry of the body that becomes a sign, highlighting the form and uniqueness of letters beyond their linguistic function, as stated on the page of the Oblong Contemporary Gallery. "In his poetics, Marini reflects on how technological evolution is transforming language, risking shifting it towards a 'non-word' in a world where the need for dialogue and communication is fundamental. Through his works, the artist emphasizes the importance of gestures, expressions, and posture, interpreting the signals of body language as a new means of communication." Furthermore, "Marini offers a reflection on the language of the present and the future of communication, liberating letters from their traditional linguistic function. His works suggest rather than declare openly, creating a dialogic game between the reader and the composer, a shared intimacy, and a pictorial gesture that recalls oriental calligraphy. BodyType is a visual experience where male and female bodies become letter-icons, moving from the realm of reading to that of visual sharing, suggesting a new perspective on language and art."**

And on Affaritaliani.it, here is the "Marini thought" on the theme of BodyType:

A century has passed since Erté designed his letters.

In the heart of Art Deco, this refined Russian illustrator (born in Saint Petersburg but naturalized in Paris) designed the letters of the alphabet with his preferred tool: imagination.

Elegant and floral drawings on paper, with the typical black background of his time.

Fascinating women, daring compositions, fire and wind, serpents and jaguars, but above all, the idea of using the geometry of the body to redesign typography.

In his privileged world (Romain de Tirtoff was born into a high-society family of Imperial Russia), the images of letters are a form of elegant escapism, the perfect narration of the Roaring Twenties.

For him, the alphabet was always an object of attention, a form of writing combined with dance.

Now, a hundred years later, the liberated letters can be reimagined with the techniques we have available.

Erté had only ink, tempera, and watercolors. Today, the new media are photography, digital graphics, and pictorial signs.

And it is by combining these three media that I have created the new language of body-letters.

They are called BodyType, and they are works on canvas that converge languages and styles.

They are a tribute to Erté, but not to his privileged society. They are the social sedimentation of our body.

The body. How much art history has represented it.

But the alphabetic body is recent.

Passing through the body art of the seventies, where the body was used as a space for social revision through its liberation, we traverse the excess of the body exhibited in the advertising of the eighties, which celebrated the discovery of fitness and the horizontal use of the female body.

The linguistic transformation of bodies passes through the harmony of the end of the century, with the rediscovery of Eastern philosophies and a new spiritual awareness. The provocative performance of body use is part of the destructive language of certain extreme artists, but I am more interested in the geometry of the body that becomes a sign. Its message and its language merge.

In my BodyType, there are no words to read, but letters to admire. The gestures become suggestions of type, accompanied by incomplete typographic signs. Suggesting is more interesting than declaring. The single letter or an entire alphabet is a dialogic game between the reader and the composer.

A partial hide-and-seek, a shared intimacy, a pictorial gesture to complete the connection with calligraphic writing, where the East peeks through with its secularized ideograms.

Like the logos that surround our lives, these male and female bodies also become letter-icons, moving from the realm of reading to that of visual sharing.

A hybridization between living corporeality and suggested calligraphy creates this linguistic combination that Erté did not have at his disposal.

But thanks to new digital media, we can now re-present it, combining objectivity with subjectivity.

Lorenzo Marini