Birds singing, sandy ground, 2014

Domenico Mangano’s art feeds off the contradictions hidden in the deepest folds of everyday life. The work with which he became well-known was La storia di Mimmo (1999), featuring his uncle, a Palermitan fishmonger affected by schizophrenia who spends his days shut up in his home, in front of the window or the television. Mangano grasps the slow and repetitive gestures, the heaviness of his body, his invectives and his dialectal wisdom, moving delicately through the never-changing life of a man. In his early works, Sicily is often featured: the artist’s homeland but above all, with its incredible complexity, the incarnation of all the outlying areas of the world. [...]