Simone Mantellassi is interested in the tragicomedy of life. Predominantly self-taught, Mantellassi is a comic savant, poking holes in the exasperations of existence as only the jester can. Untethered by genre or theory, Mantellassi is an equal opportunity collector. Like a bird collecting bits and pieces for a nest, ideas, jokes, references, shiny objects and refuse from the day amass into brilliantly timed drawings and three-dimensional sculptures. The ultimate anti-hero, Mantellassi’s works absorb the absurdities and anxieties of life and release them as laughter. 

A self-taught artist, born and raised in Florence, Italy (1971), Mantellassi moved to the United States in 2002 and lives and works in Gilbertsville, New York, in the Western Catskills. He began drawing at an early age. Inspired by comic books of the 1970s, he created his own. Self-effacing from the beginning, his first comic “Il Muro” (The Wall) was about a hero who always dies without reaching his goal. Surrounded and inspired by the Renaissance art of his hometown, Florence—with its heroic humanism, free of irony or humor—he practiced his own drawing, incorporating the absurdity of everyday life into his figurations.

Inspired by filmmakers and artists such as David Lynch, Georg Baselitz, Alejandro Jorodowsky, Josephine Halvorson, Salman Toor and Philip Guston, Mantellassi works in an aesthetic fully his own; mixing comic book storytelling, surrealism and formalism into a distinct visual language. Echoing the multi-perspective quality of comic book pages and surrealist art in his drawings, overlapping storylines and viewpoints cohabitate in one plane. Nonsensical alignments of objects and narratives intermingle with a humorous, dreamy palette of color, often paired with poetically off-kilter titles in his second language, English. Pastries (real and fake), trees, pipes, body parts, treehouses, scenes from the kitchen, shoes and trash from the woods all expand and contract between resolution and dissolution, animating a dreamlike quality where highly vivid thoughts remain incomplete and half-formed. Mantellassi is drawn toward this “half-formed” state of being, taking delight in the humor of pathos. “The downcast and the pathetic interests me very much for its human feeling of being sad and funny at the same time.”

From certain drawings, Mantellassi creates three-dimensional sculptures—compact, diorama-like compositions composed of everyday materials in plexiglas casing. The humor and irony of his work is made concretely manifest in these objects, whose crumply, crude surfaces and “imperfect” finishes are precisely where the work culminates most fully; stage-sets for the tragicomedy of life where narrative and its artifice are on display at the same time. “As a stage set, from the audience you see something—the artifice works. But from backstage you see how everything is propped up, and just barely. Like kids putting on a show. I like seeing both perspectives at the same time. With the sculptures, it is like the drawings open up and I can see behind them and see what is holding them together.” For Mantellassi, this unfiltered humor in the artifice—life as a threadbare stageset—is the best release for the strangeness of everyday life. By delighting in the absurd, much like a sage piddling in the garden, Mantellassi conjures and jests the philosophical, while sweeping the wings for the next show.