Flaminia Mantegazza

Flaminia Mantegazza, was born in Rio de Janiero. She took her first steps in the art world in the late 1990's, in Rome, where she attended the School of Ornamental Art. Her professors who had a great impression on her were João Magalhães from the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro and Alberto Parres from the Blue Gate School of Rome. Her travels take her to all of the main European cities, where she continues her quest and search with an attentive eye toward the study of urban and metropolitan areas, probing the social and the anthropological. Flaminia Mantegazza also specializes in the study of contemporary art drawn from the so-called art and craft of recycling. Today she lives and works in Rome. The artist uses the technique of collage, a technique that first appeared during the modern art scene by Picasso and Braque, an accumulation, as in the constructions of Kurt Schwitters, furniture sculptor, and papier-mâché masks, used many times by Niki de Saint Phalle . Her works are created as in a game of materialization / dematerialization within a processes that can be defined as pictorialplastic. She, in fact, moves with great ease on the grounds of visual traditions of an informal nature, creating canvases from derived material in which paper is used from magazines like the tiles of a mosaic. Flat and modulated as raw material, small pieces emerge from the surface by loosening the boundary between two-dimensional images and plastic images, suspended between painting and sculptural practice. What is manifested in her works are therefore a game of contrasts of colors, color and matter, on the canvas’ smooth monochrome and it’s volume, its physicality, and the presence of the paper that comes to form, and its mass, but that still remains abstract in its simplicity.