Volo Celeste: First solo postumous exhibition.

A homage to the artist and friend Lino Mannocci, the exhibition opened on Saturday 26 March 2022 at the Ceribelli Gallery. A gallery that has had a long-standing connection with Mannocci. The exhibition focused on Mannocci's favourite and most studied subjects: clouds. As his son, Pico Mannocci, writes at the beginning of his text published in the catalogue, ‘the cloud is the most coherent and identifiable representation in my father's work.’ Lino Mannocci was born in Viareggio in 1945, he moved to London at a very young age to study art and remained in the UK for the rest of his life, but since 1976 he spent every aesthete in Italy, in Montigiano, a village located between Lucca and Viareggio. This place, as Nadia Marchioni, art historian and friend of Lino, tells us in her text in the catalogue, ‘the origin of his painted clouds, of which, among the endless words, we have never spoken, is certainly to be found in the solitary, ecstatic observation of the landscape from his studio in Montigiano, watched over by the diamond-profiled mountains, with the characteristic blue colour of the marble stone, which seems to be tinged with the sea at sunset’. The exhibition displayed sixty works, from the late 1990s to the very last works of 2020, to which he will continue to return, despite the illness that will lead to his death on 31 March 2021, as if they were the only means at his disposal to get away from the earthly life he was living, air for his deeply reflective and philosophical mind and soul. The catalogue with texts by Arialdo Ceribelli, Pico Mannocci, Luke Elwes, Vincenzo Farinella and Nadia Marchioni is available from the gallery.