Flavio Favelli: Manatthan Club

Favelli's first solo exhibition presents exotic mysteries and half-found memories through the lens of regional kitsch.

Manatthan Club, Flavio Favelli's first solo show in Milan, is on view until the end of January 2012 at Cardi Black Box. Favelli's artistic research, expressed mainly in sculptures, installations and collages, focuses on the analysis of the symbolic and combinatorial mechanisms of memory: the nature of intimate memories, their allusive power and their relationship with public and collective history.

The show's title comes from a nightclub sign (with its misspellings) that Favelli saw somewhere in the Sicilian hinterland. The poetics of the show are already there—in the associations evoked by this "Manatthan club": a provincial town that imports the imaginary as full of meaning as, indeed, it is imaginary; a dream of transgression that refers to trashy styles, to pink and purple, to neon and black lacquer; the economic boom expressed in behaviours, tingeing them with a mixture of tender amateurism and coarse happiness. The exhibit is about all of this.

Flavio Favelli, <i>Manatthan Club,</i> installation view. Photo Simona Cupoli. — Flavio Favelli, *Manatthan Club,* installation view. Photo Simona Cupoli.

The gallery's main space hosts a series of furniture and sculptures whose atmosphere recalls the image of a 1970's club. Seemingly homogeneous bookcases, consoles, tables are, in fact, collages of pieces of other furniture that Favelli found in a treasure hunt that he has been engaged in for years. In their lines and materials, the furniture recalls 1970's tastes—that late modernism that was distorted in the pursuit of variation or visual impact. Many elements are transformed with neon applications, underlining the sculptural nature of the "collage." Some of these obviously derive from the neon signs of brands from the boom era—clearly recognizable even with their missing letters.

Flavio Favelli, <i>Manatthan Club,</i> installation view. Photo Daniele Venturelli. — Flavio Favelli, *Manatthan Club,* installation view. Photo Daniele Venturelli.

The overall effect of the objects is familiar and alienating at the same time. Of course, the furniture and the objects are recognizable, but on closer inspection they are composed of disparate parts. Of course, we recognize the signs' colors; they belong to a landscape of memory. Still it is hard to tell exactly what is missing or what is unusual in their arrangement.

The poetics of the show are already there—in the associations evoked by this 'Manatthan club': a provincial town that imports the imaginary as full of meaning as, indeed, it is imaginary...

This effect is reinforced by the imposing presence of a curtain used as a partition and which is represented in a painting on the wall. At first glance it looks like a heavy piece of red fabric draped from ceiling to floor, illuminated with strong lights to emphasize the play of light and shadows of the folds. This alternation of light and shade, however, is imprinted in the fabric itself—originally black—discolored by the sun, after having spent decades behind the window of a small museum without ever having been moved. It is not a simple optical illusion—trompe l'oeil; it is the memory of something that takes form so that it is evoked.

The transition to the atmosphere in the gallery's upper space is a sharp one. It is laid out like a small painting collection, with a variety of collages of postcards, posters, stamps, magazines, candy wrappers, composing elegant and painstaking images that are incisive and sad at the same time. Many of them bear the image or name of Sandokan, the extraordinarily successful film that is inextricably associated by Favelli (and his generation) to the memories of those years. Others hint at erotic themes in posters or written and erased material, present only as fragments. The playful and fantastic surfaces of the pieces reveal a child's elaboration of memory that obsessively links an era to a passion (Sandokan), that only partially grasps and remembers something fascinating and mysterious (sex) but returns to penetrate image after image.

The evocative power of collage—which is twofold: tied to alluding to a much wider context as well as to the repetition of the source material, to the necessarily small amount of obsessions from which they spring—closes the exhibit with the sculptures on the lower floor, created basically through a similar process (the assembly of heterogeneous parts, repetition of certain "pattern" elements). The collage process—which Favelli placed at the center of this rich and powerful show however veiled in sadness—is a process of memory that reconstructs a world through juxtaposition, repetition and reconnections to materials—multiplied and varied—that sum up everything from an epoch, filtering it, however, through a few symbols of his own obsessions. The reality of the 1970's—experienced by Favelli as a child and remembered today, passed through a sieve yet illuminated by the passing of the decades—is all there: the "years of lead," the boom, the figurines, New York, porn films depicted in tattered posters on the streets, the Manatthan Club—all under the Sandokan watermark.
Vincenzo Latronico

Flavio Favelli: Manatthan Club

Favelli's first solo exhibition presents exotic mysteries and half-found memories through the lens of regional kitsch.

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