by Bruno Manfredini
• Paolo Canevari, Manuale per giovani artisti, Dario Cimorelli editore, Milan 2024, pp. 111, € 18.
• Marco Lazzarato, Il risveglio creativo. Breve guida per professionisti dell'arte alla ricerca della propria costante creativa, Tab, Rome 2025, pp. 90, € 10.
Among the various subgenres of art literature are texts written by artists for an audience of students and/or admirers, with the aim of guiding them on a path of growth and self-awareness. A notable Italian example is the collection of writings by Luciano Fabro published in 1999 by Einaudi under the title Arte torna arte: a book that is, in every respect, the best introduction to Fabro’s talent as an artist and (something that is by no means a given) as a teacher.
Two other books have been on the market for some time now, both born out of the daily interactions between an artist – a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts – and his students: Manuale per giovani artisti by Paolo Canevari and Il risveglio creativo by Marco Lazzarato. They are worth reading, if only to dispel the misconception – one that has never been sufficiently debunked – that art is created simply by manipulating the tools and materials at hand, without any real processes of understanding, interpretation, or synthesis.
Canevari, a well-known artist and professor of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone, frames his discourse through an examination of the insights that have emerged over the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century regarding artistic practice and its relationship with other forms of expression, the media, the art market, and ideological and behavioral customs. Lazzarato, an artist and professor of Decorative Design and Mosaic Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, offers an introductory course centered on the theme of “know thyself”, on becoming familiar with the innate (but by no means “unconscious” or “obscure”) aspect of one’s own being.
Furthermore, Canevari addresses the contemporary artist who aspires to move between painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, conceived as flexible and interchangeable concepts. He proposes an immersion in the totality of reality and its conditioning factors, both artistic and non-artistic (commercial, financial, political, social, and gender-related), as a catalyst for carving out one’s own order of priorities and, if necessary, altering or subverting the one inherited. All of this is done in light of the examples that, for each issue, can be drawn from the great names who have shaped the history of contemporary art.
In turn, Lazzarato’s ideal counterpart is the decorator who, using pictorial and sculptural techniques (ranging from painted backgrounds to mosaics, from clay models to the welding of metal parts) capable of operating in two or three dimensions, proposes ornamental solutions for architecture and urban planning. The design process unfolds through successive stages of exploration, discovery, and refinement. Collecting ideas in the form of sketches and drafts to build a personal archive – one that can be expanded and organized as ideas accumulate – is the foundation of every mature creation. The underlying principle is that nothing is thrown away: instead, one sifts through, refines, and sets aside, knowing that sometimes an intuition is unripe and needs time to mature. References and examples do not point to individual artists but to circumstances and gestures of everyday experience, which take on the value of illuminating metaphors.
The two books reflect very different, even diametrically opposed, perspectives: Canevari’s is phenomenological, while Lazzarato’s is Socratic. Canevari’s book is richly illustrated, and even of the most famous artists, one can admire rarely seen photographs set in surprising contexts. Lazzarato’s book forgoes images to focus on a formula – short chapters, compelling arguments – designed to stimulate dialogue, a kind of remote debate with the reader. All that’s left is to read them both.
Homepage: Lygia Clark, O bicho linear, 1960, aluminum, variable dimensions, New York, MoMA (Wikimedia).
Below: The covers of the two books.
