Some days are better than others and today it was a good one. We are in the Milan Men fashion week over here which usually is never as exciting as the Woman’s version for us makeup artists who like to play with Barbies much more than with Kens.
I left home early this morning when the sun was rising to reach my location which by the way was in within walking distance: the Palazzo della Triennale, one of my favorite buildings and exhibition venue in town. From the 22nd of October 2016 to January 21st the Triennale hosts the exhibition of Antonio Marras that covers twenty years of his work, creativity, and imagination.
We can easily define Marras as the most eclectic, free, imaginative and subversive among Italians designers who while acting in the fashion system never seems to be trapped in its spirals. As a free thinker and a free artist he remains immersed in his visionary fantasy and brings with him, as a magic pied piper, all those who follow him fascinated and amazed.
Today he has built its parade within the installation of the exhibition, creating with 65 people, including actors, models, and dancers, a number of dreamlike and charming tableaux vivants: a huge bearded woman screaming incomprehensible stories while knitting an endless rough wool scarf, a Madonna that reveals and unravels herself through a lightweight plastic sheet that she swells while a half-naked man at her feet in adoration never reaches her height, elegant couple stuck in the Second Wartime browsing books lying in incubators, a Frida Kahlo that shows her tongue to a couple of noisy lunatics who climbing on a ladder suck a big lollipop, two lovers in a room bounded by doors are seeking their intimacy and their approach is disturbed by an obsessive character, mildly malicious, who is watching them beyond glass and again ethereal girls playing blind man’s buff, soldiers, and skinheads, oriental girls semi-abandoned on a table surrounded by trays of flowers, schoolboys with lacquered hair, throwing paper airplanes in a classroom crowded with sleeping puppets.
A whole world, gently disturbing, in which to remain suspended for some timeless time.
I stole a few pictures and a few videos, more for me than for you, and though happy that people could see a beautiful work of which I had given a bit of life, I would have preferred to be alone, to enjoy the unmistakable atmosphere only Marras knows how to create.