The Age of Innocence
Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea presents “The Age Of Innocence”, the double personal exhibition of the artists Fulvia Mendini and Andy Rementer, joined together by a linear and synthetic painting that combines the taste for illustration with a series of references to the history of art. In fact, both have developed a style characterized by a polished formal simplification and the use of a bright color palette, reminiscent of illustrated children’s stories, that evokes the memory of a lost innocence.
American, native of New Jersey, Andy Rementer studied graphic design at the University Of The Arts in Philadelphia and worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for newspapers such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Apartamento Magazine and Creative Review, while, as an animator, he collaborated with the broadcasting company MTV and the film studio Warner Bros. He has worked for two years in Treviso at Fabrica, the Benetton Group’s communications research center, along with a handful of international researchers specialized in graphic design, photography, video, music and journalism. During his two-year stay in Italy, the artist has developed a peculiar visual language inspired not only by design, comics and cartoons, but also by European art, from Romanesque art to the twentieth-century magical realism. In Rementer’s works, the urban landscape is the backdrop for a series of quick tales, ordinary stories that, however, reveal the extraordinary nature of the everyday experience.
After studying graphic design and Illustration at the European Institute Of Design in Milan, Fulvia Mendini worked at the Atelier Mendini and, in parallel, developed her own pictorial and decorative research, focusing in particular on the portrait and on the world of natural forms. A versatile artist, Mendini collaborated with artisans and companies, making potteries, sculptures, carpets, murals, jewelry and handbags. Her painting, characterized by a frontal and hieratic setting, filled with erudite citations, is the result of a refined mixture of graphic and artistic styles. If in her modern Madonne the influence of Renaissance painting – from Giovanni Bellini to Piero Della Francesca, from Pisanello to Paolo Uccello – is undeniable, in the most recent portraits, besides the obvious influence of Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist iconography, emerges, for the first time, the interest in the natural landscape, where the artist reinterprets the lesson of the Douanier Rousseau, positioning it in an Arcadian dimension populated by nymphs and fairies.
“The Age Of Innocence” compares Rementer’s urban tales to Mendini’s Edenic allegories, drawing attention to their shared graphic matrix, the terse tendency and the predilection for flat colors and bright hues. In fact, both artists build a hypothetical and sublimated world, dominated by geometry, where characters, objects and places, just like in Abbot’s Flatlandia, pave the way to the discovery of additional, multiple dimensions. On show are about thirty works, including drawings, watercolors and paintings by Andy Rementer and acrylics on canvas, panel and paper by Fulvia Mendini.
