Enzo Mari: Drawings

Enzo Mari was an inventor of languages, a constructor of grammars – intended as methods or sets of rules -, deeming these instruments necessary to “communicate knowledge with improved quality and efficiency”.It is impossible to define his discipline or his profession: he is an artist, an industrial designer, a graphic designer, an architect, but also a theorist, a pedagogue, an intellectual, possibly a philosopher, certainly a utopian who knew how to programme quiet revolutions which are, even today, often misunderstood when not totally unknown; these are some of the many facets of a complex and revolutionary personality.

The root of his design methodology, which characterises the process of all the studies he later conducted, originates in his initial research into the field of visual arts, i.e. the research into the perceptual ambiguity of three-dimensional space that he undertook in the early 1950s, when he was still a scenography student at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

What characterises Mari’s design process is a “scientific” method made up of codes, theorems, theses, the construction of tools and instruments, tests, the comparison of models and the transcription of results deriving from his observations.

This volume intend to return to the public a mnemonic atlas, a mapping system that can be used to explore and understand the complex nuances of the research conducted by Mari. Semantic research and verifications that have resulted in the programming of art, and which constitute the basis of the method that defines a process common to all the research, disciplines and utopias he pursued.