EMANUELE GIANNELLI | TO LIE OR NOT TO LIE

curated by Gianluca Marziani and Anna Lo Presti

TO LIE OR NOT TO LIE is Emanuele Giannelli’s first solo exhibition to take place in Rome. For years, his research has been focusing on the plastic world of figurative sculpture.
The exhibition, featuring around 25 works executed over the last three years, was conceived and designed as a sensory and narrative journey, an emotional descent into installations that are autonomous works, biodynamic moments of the artist’s visionary adventure among sculptural bodies.
Giannelli conceives sculpture as a protean map of the human body. For many years, his works have been tackling issues related to ethical conscience, such as genetic mutation, genome studies, multiplication of identity, cloning, plastic surgery.
Gianluca Marziani, the curator of the exhibition, argues that “Giannelli has chosen to focus on the body, and pursues his research with formal mimicry, placing a high value on perfectionism yet adopting the code of clairvoyance, of wondering intuition, of never-too-beautiful beauty. A communication strategy that works on different levels, turning the historical body into a sensitive recorder of events, capable of mixing and recodifying Nature and Culture (…). TO LIE OR NOT TO LIE combines the Shakespearian sentence with the title of the famous TV series “Lie to me”, whose protagonist carries out criminal investigations through the analysis of face and body language. Also in this case, the sculptural face is the centre of the scene: it watches and scrutinises us, looks in different directions and catches our movements (…). True and false play a game of chess on the borderline between two mountains: we are in the middle of a roaring fall, in the mental place where Giannelli's faces defy the principles of proxemics and physiognomy, becoming truer than truth and falser than falsity, just as it is supposed to be when it is not another human to look at us, but a sculptural body”.