Men and animals, trees and stars, symbols and archetypes of nature are the motifs continually repeated and reinvented out of which sprang the abundant work of Manoli setting its mark on the history of sculpture in the XXth century.
Sculptor of movement, juxtapositions, symbols, MANOLI sought to pass beyond the limit of matter, to move from massive strength to acrobatic weightlessness.
The human figure
Man, the major theme in Manoli’s sculpture, a constant throughout his long career, is the first theme that the artist tackles. His graceful, slender shapes are a hymn to the joie de vivre and the dynamic of forms. The lightness of these figures, their upward impulse contradicts the weight of metal and defies gravity. These figures create with their graceful, slender lines a hymn to movement, to the joy of living. It is in his rendering of movement that the sculptor is the most impressive.
There are mobiles, acrobats and dancers, in which the balance of form is completed by that of mass.
Assemblages
From the Sixties Manoli works with recycled material.
The sculptor’s art retains the memory of the object and enriches its history by giving it a second life; the objects are transfigured.
The unique eye with which Manoli looked at this poor man's treasure led him sometimes to discover the silhouette of a bird in a ploughshare. At other times he searched for an object with which he could begin to create: nails to make a tree, a bicycle chain to produce a bird or a human figure.
Very often the result of this search was an abstract work of art or a kinetic, mechanical work: for instance, his structures built from umbrella frames and motorised.
Fauna and flora
Manoli's work finds its fundamental source in Nature, in its different kingdoms, its primitive manifestations, its symbols. Rams and ewes, cats and panthers, elks from the north, horses; all inhabit his universe in many diverse forms.
Trees, algae, corals...Forms and forces join together in a powerful vision which moves from a legible symbol to a lyrical, oneiric transcription.
But it is the presence of the bird, diurnal and nocturnal, which is paramount. It soars, often two dimensional in an oblique plane. Apparently unmoving, it cuts through space.