These older works point to the durability of Mannino's interest in the transmogrifying properties of his chosen materials. The large studio includes vats, beaters, and drying racks, as well as shelves holding numerous examples of Mannino's recent work in handmade paper relief and cartons filled with common objects (crockery, cans, shoe trees, broken hand tools, and flea market picture frames) that he mounts in wood armatures to provide contours for the freshly couched sheets of abaca, flax, and cotton he uses to enflesh these works. Mannino was born in Rome in 1958. He always wanted to be an artist, and came to the United States in the late 1970s to study in the sculpture program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Although Mannino received his BFA in sculpture in 1980, he was already extending his studio interests toward printmaking on the one hand and installation art on the other. Returning to Italy following graduation, Mannino's work of the early 1980s included a series of white shaped canvas reliefs whose membranous surfaces prefigure his interest in handmade paper. Mannino returned to school in the late 1980s, studying sculpture again at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, where he received his diploma in 1990. Mannino supported himself as an artist in the early 1990s by teaching woodcarving at a school of applied arts in Rome. His proficiency in wood was accompanied by increasing sophistication in the combining of printmaking (intaglio, but also woodcut) and basrelief techniques in his studio work. Some of Mannino's sculptures of the time involved soft materials, like canvas and other fabrics, or paper, over armatures of wood or metal, evoking stretched skins or pelts. Another group of bas-relief works were made from slabs of thick industrial rubber, held together by bolts and other metal fasteners. The previously parallel strains of his art, skin-like frailty or else architectonic brutalism, came together when he began working with handmade paper in 1994. By draping sheets of paper over armatures, then working pigments onto those surfaces, Mannino could provide his forms with the appearance of any surface material he wanted. He liked the contradiction arising from the illusion of material density with which he could invest a fragile material by means of his treatment of the paper surface. In 1996, Mannino's education in paper as material was furthered by his participation in the "In-Depth Papermaking" workshop at the Carriage House in Boston. There, in company with many other hand papermakers, he encountered a range of methods of forming and coating paper with which he was previously unfamiliar. Mannino saw how paper could mimic virtually any material through painting, printing, drawing, rubbing, scraping, or burnishing. This mimicry was connected to a line of critical thought about the body and desire then informing the art world. Mannino's earlier work had been informed by the Italian Arte Povera artists. His use of industrial materials recalled the constructions of Mario Merz or Giovanni Anselmo, but while those artists wanted their unusual materials to be recognized as such (Anselmo, for example, making sculptures from polished granite and garden cabbages), Mannino's attention to surfaces arose from his interest in obscuring the identity of the material cladding his forms. Mannino also shared an affinity with other contemporaneous sculptors whose works substituted arrangements of materials for constructions made from them. Anish Kapoor's simple organic forms, coated with, or entirely composed of, pure powdered pigment, were an especially vivid inspiration, as well as Tony Cragg's ensembles of found and arranged plastic detritus, often all in one found color. For both Kapoor and Cragg, color is the artwork's purest material fact, but each artist also turns material truth toward strikingly illusionistic representational ends. Among artists working with paper, Mannino was enthralled by Karen Stahlecker's large-scale membranous paper sculpture, and also with the numerous artists working on/in paper by means of embedding language or letterforms in the material. In the late 1990s Mannino made some cotton and flax sheets arrayed with black paper cutout letterforms, but his interest in words on paper quickly evolved into a concern with drawing itself as both process and inscription. In a series of mainly flax doublecouched sheets, Mannino sandwiched designs in wire or string between layers, then covered their surfaces with burnished graphite, drawn on in soft pencil or Prismacolor, dusted with powdered graphite, and then burnished with various pieces of wood and even a disc of Venetian glass. Mannino wanted his drawing actions to be understood both in terms of the process of application and as the means to revealing the connectedness of his embedded designs to writing. Mannino intended for his burnishing to have a frottage effect, making visible the otherwise hidden inscriptions of his own embedded forms. This burnishing technique, with little subsequent alteration, continues to occupy Mannino today. Studio work in progress for Graphite Suite, June 2008. 36 - hand papermaking The great body of Mannino's current work, collectively titled Graphite includes many bas-relief structures wrapped in coverings of burnished graphite paper. The sheets are largely made from flax, abaca, and cotton rag, so that they will be sturdy enough to endure the stress of his drawing and burnishing. Mannino adds carbon black to his pulp so that the drying sheets are already black when he dusts them with powdered graphite and begins his burnishing. Mannino often draws on them with pencil, to make more evenly lustrous surface coatings. Mannino describes these works as being "ghost images of things," but there is little of the phantasmagorical about their densely embodied volumes. The Graphites are assemblages with skins, so to speak, whose interior arrangements of found objects seem about to burst through the stretched surfaces within which they are embedded. The quality of Mannino's drawing—its velocity, pressure, and jittery affectedness—provides viewers with a wide range of associations. His surfaces evoke rust, dust, and the passage of years, and this sense of durability is reiterated by the vestiges of odd objects that can be seen within the Graphites. Mannino characterizes the effect of his burnishing as "working on the bone," and the protrusions of mounted picture moldings, serving trays, pots, jars, cans, or the occasional child's toy, are so many elements of the works' interior skeletons. Mannino makes his burnished paper cladding contradict our knowledge of its actual material attributes, but the dense metallic sheen of these surfaces subtly reiterates our belief in the materiality of their inner parts. Four component pieces from Graphite Suite, 2009. Clockwise from top left: Squarondin (8 x 8 x 1 ½ inches), Grilla (9 x 8 x 2 inches), Ikqadra (10 x 10 x 3 inches), and Vassomio (13 ¾ x 19 ½ x 3 inches), graphite on molded handmade paper consisting of 30% flax, 30% unbleached abaca, 30% cotton rag, and 10% vellum tracing paper. For my relief sculptures, I usually make a paper that is a combination of 75 percent to 90 percent long fibers (e.g., flax, abaca, and cotton rag) with the remaining balance of very short fiber, for instance, tracing paper. I need plasticity and malleability in the wet, pressed sheets to stretch it over relief armatures. Often I double couch two sheets—with the grain horizontally in one sheet, and vertically in the other—to enhance cross strength. As paper dries on an armature, it tends to shrink and release from certain parts of the modeled surface. Generally beforehand I can predict where this might happen, and employ weights, clamps, and hot sand to allow the paper to pull from the armature in certain areas and to ensure that the paper stays in firm contact with the armature in other parts. For this sample, I used 30 percent type R flax, 30 percent premium abaca, 30 percent cotton rag, and 10 percent tracing paper. I beat each pulp separately in a two-pound 1996 Reina beater, at the following times and roll settings: flax, 6 hours at 0.3; abaca, 4 hours at 0.3; cotton rag, 3 hours at 0.4; and Diamond heavyweight vellum paper, 40 minutes at 0.0. The color is Aardvark black aqueous-dispersed pigment, with retention aid, plus 3 percent calcium carbonate. I formed the sheets on a 1996 Amies laid mould, couched the sheets on Pellons between felts, pressed them in a hydraulic press, and dried them in blotters in a forced-air drying system. To apply the graphite, I taped down the paper onto a sheet of glass and rubbed an HB woodless pencil on the paper. To achieve a polished pewter surface, I burnished the paper with an agate stone. To preserve the treated surface, I sprayed the paper with Lefranc & Bourgeois Extra-Fine Picture Varnish, as I do with my paper relief sculptures. Some of the readers will receive a tipped-in sample of the paper with an untreated outer strip that was covered by the tape, showing the difference between the original and the burnished surfaces.