"My independent paintings are based on a process of synthesis and abstraction of figurative and narrative imagery. The 'cold' and analytical description of shapes, surfaces, materials lose all reference to worlds or realities while maintaining a strong plastic vision. It's a painting that gives a body to the abstract, where ambiguity and uncertainty, including perception, characterize this problematic and unsolved balance between organic and inorganic, natural and artificial, and make the same distinction between abstraction and figuration meaningless."
Italian artist, Michelangelo Miani was born in Venice, graduated in Philosophy, and lives and works near Milan as a freelance illustrator and a visual artist. Miani works with educational and children's illustration, science fiction and fantasy, astronomy and general science as well as historical illustration, collaborating with many important publishing houses. Over the years, the artist has developed research and experimentation derived from the world of illustration. Miani has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. He employs traditional techniques like acrylic on canvas, watercolors, pencil and mixed media as well as various digital media (Photoshop, Painter.)
“Michelangelo Miani’s paintings are dominated by figures whose sculptural value is meaningful and much more significant than the graphic value. These figures are a fundamental part of his creations since they immediately bring the spectator into new expressive experiences. His works are similar to abstract art, but here the three-dimensional element is particularly stressed while, usually, it is an alien or at least non-fundamental element, in paintings focusing on abstract subjects. In Miani’s works, nothing comes directly from reality and nothing can be linked to reality. However, the artist creates a utopic reality for unreal objects. This new reality, different from ours, parallel to ours, is made up of lifeless material which comes to be dynamic through lights and colours used in a refined way. Fictional figures can be freely understood and do not need to be classified. They belong to an abstract world but, at the same time, they are so real because they become three-dimensional through the balanced use of colours and lights. Colour and light are the cornerstones of Miani’s paintings: these elements create a clear rhythm in his works and they are, therefore, never arranged by chance. They mark the rhythm through their variation. In the meantime, they connect each element in the composition shaping a uniform, unitary image. Each variation is delicate, without a clear division and without any kind of syncopation bothering the spectator’s eyes. Miani’s works are similar to “mute melodies” in which identical figures, but different to each other at the same time, move from warm to cool colours in a soft progression of hues. The light stresses the differences between smooth curves, sharp corners, lengths, thicknesses. All these details, posed in images lacking of any specificity, make any comparison about their identity impossible. They are Non-subject subjects, whose infinite reproducibility comes from their non-unique essence.”
- Andrea Rossetti
