Framing isn’t an afterthought in Manuel Grazia’s mixed media works – it’s front and centre

Italian artist Manuel Grazia started out his creative journey on a three-year advanced photography course in Florence before moving into the kind of mixed media work that’s shaping his unique portfolio today. Relocating to the north of Italy, the artist moved to Milan after his time at art school in order to develop his professional practice. Here, he found his personal style in a hybridization of techniques, discovering what he refers to as “a more authentic and layered expressive language” for image making.

Influenced by everything from pop aesthetics to traditional textiles, the artist’s work merges saturated, colourful images with unexpected framing choices, like his series of portraits of wrestlers generated with AI, printed on fabric and cut and sewn into crocheted structures that look like the doilies on your grandma’s kitchen table. Unlike most photo framing that lets the image do all the talking, Manuel’s statement furry squares or hand cutouts have just as much to say as each of his photographs, if not more.

For the artist, images often become “a support for a tangible reworking”, a starting point for much more. “I love to integrate manual interventions such as printing on fabric, sewing, and collage, transforming the work into more complex and tactile objects,” he says. This preference for analogue production stems from a desire that a lot of us have when making images: to get off our screens. Unreliant on any one digital software, the “immediacy and physicality of the manual gesture” is what is drawing Manuel to this style of image making.

Manuel’s work shows that photographs don’t have to start and end with the lens: “I attribute equal, if not greater, importance to the conceptual design and creative research that precede the shooting of an image,” he ends. “I believe the photographic act is part of a holistic process that requires careful curation right from its preliminary stages, as well as an honest and visceral final re-elaboration.”