Adriano Menei
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'Life is not what you have lived, but what you remember and how you remember it in order to tell it'
(Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez)
Tossicia, Via Camerale 6 (TE)
64049
Italy
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My story
No longer being able to speak and move your whole body freely.
An ischemic attack.
This is what happened to Adriano Menei, painter and professor of Architecture at the Liceo Artistico “Guido Montauti” in Teramo.
Born in Teramo in 1958, after a career that began at the Liceo Artistico of Teramo and continued with a degree in Scenography at the Academy of Fine Arts of L'Aquila, as well as a teaching qualification in the Art of Scenography, he was prematurely struck in October 2018 by this insidious illness that suddenly bursts in, upends and disrupts, taking away everything you are.
Subjected to life-saving and rehabilitative therapies, despite a mild recovery for which he still has difficulty walking and almost no speech, he returned to the artistic world that has always accompanied him since 2020, because the communicative will of man is innate.
In disability there is the ability to reinvent oneself and to seek unthinkable means and ways to express oneself: and what better way to start again than the passion for art, a lifelong companion for Adriano?
It is with his left hand, the limb opposite to the one he had always used before the stroke, that he finds himself first experimenting with writing attempts to trace his name in large, shaky block letters, and then, through a true evolutionary journey of learning and education, to draw geometric, soft, concrete lines. All this gives life to still lifes and landscapes inspired, at first, by the vision of famous and well-known works from various currents in the history of art.
After these first attempts, real sketches, with uncertain and wavering strokes, day by day he matures his own technique with pastel pencils through a passionate, recreational, and timeless daily practice.
To date, his output counts more than 150 personal drawings that explore, with pastel colors, vibrant hues, exaggerated strokes, landscape glimpses and still lifes, conscious and vivid moods.
From 2020 to today, the commitment poured into these works of art has become his only main expressive activity, which sees him involved daily in the production of these works and which has reconnected him with the spirit that has always animated his pictorial production of mixed technique paintings since the 1990s.
A reconnection to his artistic flair and to a new sense of life that not even disability can prevent or undermine.
