The Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art presents a selection of fantastic images by Animani , the first of a varied series of inventions created by Mario Mariotti by painting his hands, in shapes that were originally inspired by human footprints and shadow plays, then developed in a living project still in progress.

Pliny the Elder wrote that we have no certain knowledge of the beginning of the art of painting… but everyone agrees that it originated in drawing lines around the human shadow.

Mario Mariotti echoes this almost nineteen centuries later, saying that our increasingly visual culture tends to make the production of images coincide with daily life, to the point of confusing us. But the company of our faithful shadow still seems sufficient to restore our imagination, with the complicity of a small light, to lead us back to the intact wonder contained within the cave: the imprint of a hand, from which we cannot move away .

For a moment, in the colorful representations of a bestiary, Mariotti fixes new creatures generated by the illusionistic conjunction between images of animals and movements of the hands, inviting anyone to try: all that remains - as he stated - is to roll up one's sleeves and dive into the color and imagination to give birth to as many new Souls as the cage of a book cannot contain, which move freely and are never in danger of extinction.