Fiorenzo Mussi, Behind the cover ItaliaImballaggio 04/2024

Fiorenzo Mussi, born in 1954, is a graphic designer and has been working in the field of visual communication since 1976.

The “tools” that populate his studio in Lissone (MB), immediately reveal his solid training: art and technical studies applied to the world of advertising, a longstanding experience at the Famiglia Artistica Lissonese of Gino Meloni to learn the basics of painting, and the current profession, which focuses on the image and communication through the wise use of new technologies.

Today his research is oriented towards a pure and silent material abstractionism, with counterpoints of some independent and, sometimes, dissonant melodic lines. A representation of “legàmi legànti”, that is, constraints, forcing, compromises that each of us inevitably and unconsciously undergoes.

A return to manual skills, to plasticity, with the use of different materials creates a narrative that is first pictorial, realized through the use of halftones and shaded colors reminiscent of Pantone swatches, or through grids that recall photographic post production.

Mussi’s roots lie in the ideal encounter with the “father” of advertising design, Piet Mondrian, whose neo-plastic lesson he internalized: by combining a vertical and a horizontal line, or two elementary colors, the work becomes construction, abstract, essential and geometric. However, Mussi goes further, he dedicates himself to real tactile explorations that integrate metal nets, ropes, barbed wire, textile twists to the neutral backgrounds, narrating a physical and very current sense of fragmentation, of disintegration, of a whole that must be held together and at the same time left free from constraints, constrictions and compromises.

In other material works, through the use of fabrics and different thicknesses, Mussi seeks a relief beyond flatness, and when he finds it, suddenly, between shiny and opaque, soft and rigid, differences in level are revealed, footprints, tracks, grooves. And new meanings, new possibilities that highlight the great contradictions of our time.