Ten years after the death of Piero Dorazio, Lorenzelli Arte is opening a one-man exhibition of his work entitled Il colore della pittura (The Color of Painting). It is a fitting homage to the great master of Italian abstract painting and, perhaps, one of the greatest colorist of his generation. The exhibition aims to represent this greatness also through work that during his career had been considered “less interesting”.
Often critics, and by consequence collectors' taste, tend to fossilize and idealize a specific period in an artist's production and consider successive work corollary because they are considered a fall from the preceding “pinnacles”. This perceptual prejudice, which engenders the crude monetarism of the art market, tends to crystallize creative values, regulating them with the habitual categories of value applicable to others human activity. Fortunately art wiggles away from this reasoning, or at least should liberate itself from the usual classifying logic. In the light of this it appears clear how much banal common sense has obfuscated the real weight of the work of Piero Dorazio following Reticoli (concluded in 1964/1965). The intention of this exhibition is to reiterate, if there was any need to, that the painting and the production of this great artist go beyond their identification with a mere specific period, but rather developed in diverse forms over the trajectory of his entire life.
The obvious comparison is seen in works such as Longchamps of 1965, Discanto of 1975, Physis VI of 1980 and Max-well of 1984, to name a few; proof positive of the great expressive and coloristic qualities of Piero Dorazio. These works participants in the same vibrations of the most successful monochrome work of the preceding period.
The elegant formal intelligence, combined with the chromatic knowledge found in the exhibited work, indicate an evident and coherent upward evolution in comparison to the world of monocromi (call reticoli/lattices), united by the same weave of light and color. Not to mention the autonomy of the artist who escaped the cultural traps of a period that oscillated between instinctual abstraction and dogmatic Bauhaus rigor, and who instead joyfully pursued a search moored to a long Italian tradition inflected with the language of modernity.
A bilingual catalogue with reproductions of all the work shown and a collection of quotes from significant critical texts is being printed on the occasion of this exhibition.
