On Wednesday 17 May 2023, the Pastificio Cerere Foundation presents NO DIAMONDS IN THE SKY , the first solo show in Rome by Davide Mancini Zanchi curated by Marcello Smarrelli, with a text by Saverio Verini. The exhibition will be open to the public from Thursday 18 May to Friday 21 July 2023.

Davide Mancini Zanchi uses painting, sculpture, installation and performance in a conceptual and ironic key, his poetics is characterized by the production of objects and scenarios where traditional artistic media exchange roles and functions mixed with common elements taken from everyday life. The performative experience, the irreverent and at the same time carefully studied approach, the use of heterogeneous materials, the plurality of cultural references, implement a process of decontextualization of reality that creates unsettling and high-impact scenarios.

For the Pastificio Cerere Foundation, the artist presents NO DIAMONDS IN THE SKY – a title inspired by the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds – a site-specific installation designed for the SILOS space, inspired by her most iconic cycle, that of the Heavens . Mancini Zanchi has created many skies dotted with bright white stars, a direct reference to the frescoed vaults of churches and sacred buildings present throughout Italy and characteristic of medieval art.

Mancini Zanchi's skies are not created through a traditionally pictorial gesture, but contemplate an important element for his artistic practice: action. The stars, in fact, are the result of a game as irreverent as it is tiring, a performance carried out in an absolutely private way, chewing the paper and spitting it – literally – on the monochrome surface through the use of a Bic pen transformed into a blowgun.

A starry sky that is tragic – if one thinks of the physical effort to create it – and at the same time dreamy – if brought back to the playful attitude – with the evident dualism that characterizes his poetics, loaded with the historical and ancestral weight that always accompanies this particular iconography.

The mechanical and stressful repetition of a game between students creates a "world": perhaps the reason why the Mancini Zanchi's skies are devoid of any rhetoric.