Miltos Manetas

Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea, Milan
Through March 16

The underlying impulse to Miltos Manetas’ work is an attempt to codify the contemporary in art. The most revealing example of this interest on his part is the neologism NEEN: rhyming with “screen,” and half way between “cream” and “dream,” in the artist’s own language the term also means “new.”

Manetas adopted NEEN to explicate a current trend in art today and his faith in it allows him to draw on various universally accepted and recognized icons of contemporary culture, whether social or technological. In past works, these items have ranged from the cell phone to the computer mouse, from wires and cables to keyboards and screens, and videogame heroine Lara Croft.

The main protagonists in this new series of work, “After Pokémon,” are the characters from the cult Japanese cartoon, which has exploded in popularity with the current generation of Western children. The Pokémon creatures are a product of the Japanese culture and the parameters governing that society; borrowed as mass images in the West, they become, in Manetas’ words, “history without references.”

The best visual and artistic translation of this affirmation are his “vibracolor” works—images taken from computer screens, which portray the main characters of this band of famous little monsters. The artist creates the works by printing a film still onto gloss paper and progressively wetting and stretching the paper until the proportions are magnified. On display in this exhibition in Milan, was an enormous triptych in which the effects of blurring and the manipulation of the original digital image create a strong visual impact.

Perhaps this method of “washing” the image, and the new vibrant—and in a certain sense—abstract traits emerging from it, hint at Manetas’ confidence in effecting a reading of the contemporary that follows his own personal interpretations and reflections.




Paola Noé
Translation by Rosalind Furness