Alongside the activities of journalism artist and illustrator, Mannelli carried out a personal painting research, presented over the years in numerous exhibitions and festivals: from Global Soup (1999 - Galleria AAM), Signs and Designs (Tricromia Art Gallery) and the pictorial cycle Stanze di Guerra(2001), from which flows the multimedia performance Electric Cabaret.
In 2008 he recorded the cycle Apotheosis of the corrupt, projected as a virtual frieze on the outside wall of the Ara Pacis in Rome.
Of 2012, is the exhibition in progress Notes for the reconstruction of beautyat Galleria Gagliardi San Gimignano and the book-by-true A. for Tricromia Art Gallery.
Fine penna mai, Lit Editions, Rome 2013 "With a genuine curiosity in dimension of our morbid thoughts, Riccardo Mannelli drags and involves us in a cruel reality, of erotic obsessions, of disturbance, of torments of the flesh, in a rework of The 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini".
Vittorio Sgarbi, in Art Exhibitions in the 54th Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Antiga Editions, 2011 "There are two things that Riccardo Mannelli’s paintings communicate: the first is that the story of the adventures and misadventures of the soul is surely written in the body, the second is that the body brings us into the undifferentiated disturbing scenario, from which men are emancipated to inaugurate their own story, but from which they must be accompanied if they do not want to extinguish.
Umberto Galimberti, in Comedy in Z.E.R.O, Art Core Editions, Perugia 2006 "One should remind his ability to develop complex mixed techniques, where the calligraphic stroke of pencils, ballpoints and pens, is combined with different pigments - pastels, watercolors, oil and chalks - set for subsequent coats on absorbent substrates of cotton-paper".