Calligraphy

Critique sheet

Opening the rich 2025 programme will be Pastorello with an exhibition entitled ‘Calligrafie‘. Giovanni Manunta, aka Pastorello, is one of the most capable and decisive artists on the contemporary art scene in Sardinia. A pure painter, in his pre-adamic and psychedelic landscapes, he does not convey messages that are not inherent to the painting practice itself. Hence their semantic ambiguity, their self-referentiality and their being alien and faux-hospitable. For the Museo Organica, Pastorello presents a calligraphic rewriting of nature and decides to take nature not so much as a subject as a language, transforming and isolating organic elements into visual signs that lead back to writing, rhythm and communication. Through the medium of painting, the artist offers a metaphysical reading of the natural world: ancestral trees in timeless forests, worlds perennially in fieri, dominated by seductive and fatal characters, hybrid creatures mixed with history and myths. Ivo Serafino Fenu, curator of the exhibition, writes: “Pastorello’s painting practice is simultaneously an act of listening to and transcribing the living world, and each of his works, like primitive writing, becomes an instrument to connect the human and the natural, revealing a secret order beneath the surface of the visible. In an era of environmental disconnection, recovering this vision also means imagining a new form of balance, where the sign, like man, does not dominate nature but interprets it, rethinks it and transcribes it in beautiful form: rewriting nature is a magical act, an act of responsibility, an act of love but, at times, it can also be a piercing cry of alarm, because the limit between idyll and apocalypse is very subtle”.

Biography

Giovanni Manunta (aka Pastorello) was born in Sassari in 1967. He attended the Sassari Art Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. He lives in Sassari. Pastorello’s painting is a transversal, ambiguous and depressing, citationist but cultured, steeped in suggestions of the Nordic 16th century, from Dürer to Altdorfer, passing through Hieronymus Bosch and his gardens of delights, of whirling and ‘sublime’ post-romantic or virtual apocalyptic visions. He has been exhibiting since 1989 in solo and group exhibitions. Among the most important are: “Nel bosco”, Galleria Withe Project, Pescara 2005; “Biennale Sardegna”, Masedu arte contemporanea, Sassari 2011; “Unnatürlich”, Pirandello Berlin, Berlin 2012; – “Come Pittura”, Galleria Colombo, Milan 2013; “I giardini dell’Eden”, Pinacoteca C. Contini, Oristano 2014; “Kolossòi. Pastorello nell’Isola dei Giganti”, Foro Boario, Oristano 2024

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