Giovanni Manzo | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

A Neapolitan, Giovanni is a generous and enthusiastic artist with a modern approach to painting. He is internationally known for his innovative style that harmoniously blends three artistic techniques: photography, graphic design and painting. Photography reveals reality and movement, graphic art gives a contemporary and dynamic touch to the image, and oil painting places the whole in a romantic view that belongs well to the Italian cultural tradition. Giovanni's clearly claimed influences are Impressionism, Tachism (or Informal Art, very popular in the forties and fifties) and "Tonal Impressionism" (referring to an exhibition organized by art historian Harry Muir Kurtzworth in 1937). This last influence corresponds to a simplified representation of subjects with a deliberate lack of detail and using a limited palette with variations of the same colors. Giovanni likes to paint cities, urban landscapes or street scenes, revisiting them with a fresh and colorful point of view. His technique breaks with traditional figuration: the forms are dressed with indecisive contours and variegated hues. When we look closely at his work, it is a succession of dots and lines of an informal nature that appears. But if we move a few feet away, then the work takes on its full dimension... an innovative way of revisiting Impressionism using the tools of the graphic arts. Giovanni's works are a constantly renewed search for a mirror representation, paralleling the oldest streets of Naples with those of New York, a metropolis that is almost futuristic by comparison. His secret desire: perhaps to unify the two cities through the technical innovation that the artist calls "contemporary impressionism".