Quindici, il Gorilla

Danese continues its programme of reissuing Enzo Mari's prints, graphic works that marked both his own history and the evolution of Italian design. It brings back four animals from the Serie della Natura: “Sei, l’orso”, “Sette, il leone”, “Quattordici, la rana”, “Quindici, il gorilla”. The series grew out of the search for a way to turn an image into a symbol through a programmed reduction that works towards eliminating the superfluous in favour of meaning, with art multiples in view. Mari began working on the subjects that make up this series as early as 1957, when he conceived the first version of the Gioco delle Favole. Some of the figures distilled for that interactive story were taken up in the screenprints from 1964 onwards, under the name Serie della Natura. Now a symbol of Danese’s output, this series is one of the few examples of editions that achieve the aim of creating ‘artistic’ images for the home founded on the idea of seriality, in favour of a democratic quality — art within everyone’s reach. In each of these subjects, forms and colours are long studied and carefully calibrated, so as to create not faithful representations of a specific subject but icons, symbols of archetypal subjects.