Artist Manifesto

The following treatise summarizes a profound work of itinerant research that uses error as a tool to highlight the close relationship between man and machine, the contrast between past and present, between classicism and contemporaneity.
The artistic project officially began in May 2006 with the presentation of the work “Dynamics of the Contemporary” (during the collective exhibition Si rip-arte at Atelier 1380, Milan) and is the result of a research journey that started almost ten years earlier through the collaboration between Andrea Sbra Perego and Simone Jabba Torri. Drawing from the graphic study of writing from those years and their shared fine arts education, with particular attention to movements such as Futurism and Action Painting, they set out to find a new language functional to narrating the present, while cherishing their cultural roots, born of Italy’s classical tradition.

Since 1996, the duo has participated in artistic-cultural events and happenings with performances across the national territory; however, their collaboration abruptly ended in 2000, only to resume six years later. By combining their shared experiences with the individual ones matured in the intervening years, they gave life to a new research project, choosing to work together as a duo and founding the partnership Oroccoccoro, which emerged almost spontaneously from the natural understanding between the two artists. Perego and Torri share the need to find an original and contemporary way of communicating, free from constraints, in pursuit of an honest art capable of analyzing society in a detached and objective manner, while being an active part of it. In response to this need, they began working on the idea of The Prologue, a project-exhibition developed in four phases, intended as a prelude to a broader discourse, later formalized in the Manifesto.

1. Spontaneous Action
   The first phase consists of the spontaneous (chap. Improvisation) and direct action of the artists in close contact with the urban context (chaps. Circus and Contemporary Decò). In the summer of 2006, this led them on a tour across Italy (Fano, Pesaro, Pavia, Padua, Rome, Ladispoli, Petriolo, and Milan), resulting in various interventions in the territory.
2. Studio Re-elaboration
   During the second phase, the previously acquired material (photos, artifacts, videos) is reworked in the studio to become “the work” (chap. Channeling), a refined and intellectual product intended for exhibition, born from technical, cultural, and aesthetic choices.
3. Treatise on the Manifesto
   The third phase involves drafting the Treatise on the Manifesto, which captions the duo’s artistic production for the public and outlines the characteristics of a style they love to define as neo-new Oroccoccoro.
4. Synthesis and Presentation
   The synthesis of the work (chap. Synthesis) was presented to the public on June 14, 2006, by Torri and Perego at the Mazzoleni Gallery in Bergamo under the title The Prologue, accompanied by a preview of the manuscript “The Fantastic Treatise on the Oroccoccoro Manifesto”.

With the definitive transition into the new millennium, we acknowledge the historical, cultural, and urban changes, feeling the need to find an artistic language capable of representing a society now transformed by new rhythms and means of communication. The ability to communicate quickly and globally is, at the same time, raising a barrier of incommunicability that undermines effective communication, with inevitable repercussions on social relationships.
Having lived the past, living the present, and imagining the future, we are inevitably witnesses to these changes and want to be active participants, rejecting the role of passive spectators. Drawing inspiration from Futurism, a movement rooted in a context of change comparable to today’s, we propose ourselves as the first new Italian artistic movement of the third millennium. We choose the manifesto form to present a style that serves as a global communication language for tangible content, borrowing communicative methods from now-anachronistic stylistic forms to represent the contemporary.
We draw a line of fracture with what is old, no longer current, now part of the past millennium, and lay the foundations for a style capable of giving form to every concept through a logical process akin to mathematics: painting as calculation, the artist as intellectual.

Why the circus? The circus is a metaphor for contemporary society, theatrically represented through artifices. We, as artists, position ourselves as the “freaks” at the center of the ring, drawing the audience’s attention. In the exaggerated relationship between the public and the freak, we find a metaphor for the connection between humanity and the excesses of the contemporary.
The language of the circus and its posters, already rooted in the collective imagination, allows for immediate communication through a freely reinterpreted use of the drop technique. This recreates the illusion of a simple advertising message that captures attention but, upon closer analysis, reveals profound content, leveraging visual impact to generate a strong emotional charge.

The phase following improvisation is channeling, which takes place in the studio. Here, the ideas sketched during the spontaneous phase are reworked to achieve maximum communicability. There are three types of channeling:

1. Channeling of Style: Makes the content inherent in the documented situation legible.
2. Channeling of Explosiveness: Maximizes visual impact, translating direct action in the territory into graphic language.
3. Channeling of Attention: Studies the elements of representation to guide the viewer into an almost obligatory reading of the work.

The sum of these processes produces the final result intended for the public. 

Synthesis is the concluding realization phase. The heterogeneity of direct-action work and the vastness of the expressed concepts pass through channeling to reach their definitive form: the artwork, an aesthetic and communicative object suited to expressing the sentiment of its time.

Advertising, a technique of imagery for commercial purposes, lacks deep communicative structures and has devastating effects on a public accustomed to this standard, inhibited in aesthetic taste and investigative capacity. By exploiting the immediacy of advertising language, we capture the viewer’s attention, who, disoriented by the absence of a product, is prompted to investigate the communicative function of the image: art as non-advertising.

• Acknowledge the beginning of the new millennium, detaching from the past without denying it.
• Set no spatial-cultural boundaries, making the style a global language of content.
• Adopt a lucid, objective, and detached perspective.
• Make the most of contemporary methods, market rules, and communicative techniques.
• The work is no longer just the product of studio work, but the very act of living in contemporary society.
• The work has its own life, with a beginning, development, and end, like a book or a film.
• Direct and commercial visual impact, but with deep content and forms capable of carrying strong emotional weight.
• The tool must not constrain the technique, nor should the technique condition the development of the idea.
• Error is an expressive means that sometimes highlights the close relationship between man and machine.
• These axioms have no limits to their possible applications.