Deeply influenced by Bonnard and Chagall, his successive workshops in Paris, Milan, Seville, Madrid, Brussels, Genoa are all stages where, starting from "the need to take up the question of being"[1] dear to Martin Heidegger, he has gradually developed a work centered on the adventure of man based on the long term and on the invariances of the world which he calls Permanenza.
[2] His work is essentially distinguished by an unclassifiable and very marked pictorial style, strongly influenced by Assyrian and Persian sculpture and bas-reliefs.
According to him, faced with the need for a paradigm shift – generated by indicators of the ongoing exhaustion of modernity – his painting offers the exact opposite of Cubism.
In 1962, at the age of 14, he entered the statuary workshop of Mario Luisetti and attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
In 1979, he was in Paris, and associated with the architect Michel Écochard whom he met in Tehran, he participated in the first competition of the Institut du Monde Arabe.
These years were marked by the increasingly irresistible call of painting - nevertheless, although having ceased to practice the profession of architect, he completed the work on Villa S[9] in Asnières, which was his ultimate built project.
From 1987 to 1995, Roberto Mangú lived in Milan where he notably painted the series Gli Uomini in piedi (Standing Men) exhibited among others by Philippe Daverio and at the Cantini Museum in Marseille.
The paintings Corpus Mundi, San Francesco or Gracias y mucha suerte para todos (inspired by Le Bateau ivre, a poem by Arthur Rimbaud) are representative of this Milanese period.
It is there, in his painting San Francesco (inspired by Zurbaran) that the shadow of Mintak arises in his consciousness, coming from what Mangú calls "the Jaguar spirit", and which for him represents the force of life and its concept of Permanenza .
Because of the vitality shown in his earlier paintings notably "Virée sur la côte"[11] or "Taureau mécanique", his extraordinary knowledge and skillful use of colours especially intense reds (cf Lola), his work is sometimes mistakenly cited as belonging to one of the following movements: neo-expressionism, or Transavantgarde.
[8] As Alessandra Troncana remarks in the Corriere della Serra[12] Mangú's work is far too original and personal to be so easily classified.
In 2023, Aude de Kerros cites him several times in her book Hidden Art Finally Unveiled,[4] in his capacity as an artist having “chosen France despite the dogmatic rule because that is where he dreamed of being ».
In Le Cœur émeraude de Roberto Mangú, Alain Santacreu[13] sees in this the expression of "an ancestral pictorial tradition, primordial, rooted in the religiosity of origins.
Ciò che mi ha convinto della loro autenticità, era quanto essi corrispondessero al tuo aspetto medesimo.
[15] In the 1980-90s, these themes include standing men, monoliths, saints, which all seem to converge in his large masterpiece, a dark picture of a "Saint George" In the 2000-10s, according to Gwen Garnier-Duguy in Le Sens de l'Épopée,[16] three central themes run through Roberto Mangú's paintings: Mintak, seen as an Aleph by Santacreu, Permanenza and La Refloraison du Monde.
The vision of the cyclists, represented in their race, does not simulate movement but on the contrary presents a character of immobility which propels them through all times.
Some paintings: Quadriga, Winner, Mechanical Toro, Gothic Journey...[7] The Women on the Terrace series – the archetype of timeless femininity.
His life in Milan revolves around two series – the Standing Men and the Divers – a set of paintings which highlight his positioning with regard to the fundamental concept of duration which he opposes to the inseparable couple of time and progress.
Freed from the obligation of the new and the religion of progress – as Jean-Claude Michéa explained in his 2014 book The Orpheus Complex[17] – his paintings present themselves as a manifestation of an immutable and timeless dream of the human adventure, that of man, the keystone, rooted between his cave origins and his time.
This timeless vision reminded him of a line from Gérard de Nerval 's poem, El Desdichado : "I dreamed in the cave where the mermaid swims."
[2] In 2012, Roberto Mangu appeared on the cover of the book Du religion dans l'art - contrelittérature, published under the direction of Alain Santacreu with his painting The Emerald Heart.