Riccardo Mannelli

Riccardo Mannelli (born 20 January 1955), is an Italian artist and illustrator.

Born in Pistoia, he has lived and worked in Rome since 1977. He graduated as a surveyor and began attending the School of Architecture in Florence without finishing his studies. "I was lucky to meet Emilio Isca from Turin", he says, "which published Help, the only satirical magazine of the time. I started to do some drawing for him. From there on began my profession."

One of the most incisive and sharp Italian pencils, Mannelli since 1975 has been working with the most leading Italian satirical magazines (Il Male, which was one of the founders, Cuore, Boxer), with comic magazines as Linus and Alter Linus, and with newspapers and magazines such as Playmen, Blue (Coniglio Editore), L’Europeo, La Stampa, Il Messaggero, Lotta Continua, Il Manifesto, La Repubblica, Il Fatto Quotidiano and abroad L’Heco des Savanes (France), Humor, pagina 12 (Argentina), Il caffe (Locarno)

He was the author of illustrated reportages first for La Repubblica then for Cuore. Between 1982 and 1983, he lived for three months in Nicaragua and brought to completion one of the first examples of what would have been then defined graphic journalism: a live reportage that portrays through drawings accompanied by captions, the plight of the country at the time of the guerrillas unleashed by the counterrevolutionaries. He went later in the former Yugoslavia, "In the war, under the bombs as an idiot", he says in an interview with the newspaper La Repubblica: "Usually journalists, in places of war, work from the hotels collecting agencies. But I demanded permits and I rented a car and went to see personally [...]. I start and draw. I do it from the battlefields, from cafes, from the inside of a compact car with which I have roamed in the 1980s to 20 thousand kilometers".

Alongside the activities of journalism artist and illustrator, Mannelli carried out a personal painting research, presented over the years in numerous exhibitions and festivals: from Global Soup (1999 - Galleria AAM), Signs and Designs (Tricromia Art Gallery) and the pictorial cycle Stanze di Guerra(2001), from which flows the multimedia performance Electric Cabaret.

In 2008 he recorded the cycle Apotheosis of the corrupt, projected as a virtual frieze on the outside wall of the Ara Pacis in Rome.

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