Self Portrait

Giannelli has lived in Versilia for many years but he has always felt close to his hometown, Rome, a place he left but never abandoned.

In Versilia, amongst seaside pinewoods and the Apuan mountains, the world of hand-crafted sculpture has thrived; and this is where our artist experimented with materials and techniques with great curiosity and manual skill. 

Statistics show that the themes of anatomical sculpture are gaining great interest again, and that it could be the art form designed to grow the most in the next twenty years.

Giannelli has been pursuing mutant anatomy since he was a student with recklessness and freedom from the evolution of style internationally.

He chases an obsession, just like artists who are forward-thinking and know how to manage their talent do. 

He carries on in cycles which, a little at a time, add a piece to his hyper-genetic code of sculpture.

He faces the world through the flexibility of the human body, through semantic gesture, through muscular enlargement and compression. He creates archetypes which intermix references and similarities, film-like atmospheres and literary influences.

You feel like those bodies could be our future or the past of alien populations: too-human human but also almost-human alien and vice versa.

Possible and plausible envelop the series exhibited at Palazzo Collicola Visual Arts Museum: a backwards viewing that starts with the newest sculptures from 2015 and flies back to some of his oldest work, with highly theatrical pieces, sometimes singular and sometimes multiplied in sculptural groups…it’s a long recount of predetermined and imagined destinies of silent humanity, separated in emotional and sensorial segments, with the rooms becoming the stage curtain of a living and strangely still theatre, halted when Giannelli stopped his gaze, ceasing the perfect moment, the moment of balance achieved.