Nulla dies sine linea

The exhibition at the Milan Triennale relates Antonio Marras’s visionary world, highlighting the emotion-driven and intellectual signs that marked important stages in his life.

Triennale Design Museum presents, from 22 October 2016 to 21 January 2017, “Antonio Marras: Nulla dies sine linea”, an anthological exhibition of works of art executed over the last twenty years, illustrating Antonio Marras’s visual trajectory.

Antonio Marras Triennale — “Antonio Marras: Nulla dies sine linea”, Triennale Design Museum Milano

The exhibition’s title – Pliny the Elder’s famous phrase with which he referred to the painter Apelles who “never let a day pass without tracing a line” – alludes to how Marras has always combined his work as a stylist with that of the artist. In the words of curator Francesca Alfano Miglietti, the exhibition is intended as: “a fully-involving experience, a journey into a stimulating, provocative world (stimulating because it is provocative) that is sometimes absolute, sporadically uninhibited”.

Antonio Marras, known as “the most intellectual of Italian stylists”, is renowned above all for creating fusions of the worlds in the creative universe, from cinema to poetry to history and visual art. This last is in fact the focus of the exhibition. Marras has often featured in exhibitions and he himself has organised shows and events. Winner of the Francesca Alinovi Award and a highlight of one of the last few Venice La Biennale, Marras stands at the centre of a poetic universe comprising different languages, oscillating among digressions from one material to another, from one technique to another, from one expressive form to another.

“Antonio Marras: Nulla dies sine linea”, Triennale Design Museum Milano

In addition to a series of new and previously seen installations, for the Triennale exhibition, Marras has reworked over five hundred drawings and paintings he did over the years. He has mounted them in new frames, woven the most diverse fabrics into them and hung them on the walls of the Curva della Triennale. They are both witnesses to and narrators of the life illustrated in the “rooms”, i.e. installations with windows, doors and openings, inhabited by old clothes (none of which he designed) and objects of various kinds and styles. This fluid exhibition design displays over 1,200 square metres. It also displays Marras’s meetings and relations, such as those with Maria Lai and Carol Rama, who were the first to encourage him to show works he had kept hidden. The journey ends with a story of a nomadic life. Hundreds, thousands of drawings, sketches, snippets that Marras has created over the years during his innumerable travels: memories of expressions, maps, voices, silences, thoughts, worlds. Notebooks, albums and diaries filled with colours, bearing witness to an endless, unrepressed creative flair.

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