On the Matter is the title of a thematic group show that develops in the spaces of lorenzelli arte in two moments of exhibition, intended to shed light on the trends and motivations that drive historical and contemporary artists to use in their research one or more materials in an innovative, consistent, repeated and in some cases even obsessive way.
The exhibition is divided into two phases: the first, which opens on Wednesday 20 November and extends until January, raises the scenario on works from the twentieth century to the postmodern era, showing how the selected artists have invented, found, assembled, manipulated, thickened and exasperated the materials, to elaborate a language that now intends to revive, from within, traditional tools and materials of art, now knows how to bring new material elements in the process of conception and composition of the work.
Opens the path on the works-manifesto of the first research mode the Pictorial Formula (n.8) of 1920 by Pavel Mansurov: necessary presence to remember the extraordinary lesson of the historical avant-gardes, lesson delivered as a witness, a warning and an incitement to the second post-war period, when artists have to reconstruct on the rubble of a world in turmoil: you have to ask yourself “what to do”, and “how to do” to express what happened, to shape what will happen. You have to touch, choose, try to build with what remains, with what you can imagine. The ferment of the new, in an age torn between fall and hope, leads artists to look at matter as a source of inspiration.
On Matter: so you get up again.
“Every generation, no doubt, believes itself destined to remake the world. Mine knows it will not do so again. Its task is perhaps greater: it consists in preventing the world from destroying itself”.
Albert Camus read his speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957: his words echo among works in gallery, starting from the example of Conrad Marca-Relli with Unications R-3, 1957, where oil painting intervenes on a complex collage on canvas, creating a theatrical piece in which the compositional elements fight epically on the surface, renewing from within the method and forms of painting; Then there are the investigations of the French artist Jean Dewasne who orchestrates the dazzling abstract symphony where the enamels on the canvas make shine his antipode L’or antipode of 1959; or again, the four imposing sculptures by Miguel Berrocal - Opus 4 Roma, Opus 6 Roma, Opus 6 bis Roma, Opus 13 Roma, made between 1956 and 1958 - where the forged iron raises muscular bodies, warrior power that open the sculpture to new compositional dynamics and iconic. Vittorio Tavernari’s two works, two bodies - Crocefissione del Nord, 1961 e Cristo Crocefisso (suite nordica) 1961-1962 - which are Christological busts of woodworked with a sacred sense of tragedy.
The questions about the tools and methods of painting belong to the imposing Loud by Giorgio Aricò, dated 1965: a work that cries out aloud its powerful composition turned green; to the Weisser Jatus dated 1974 by the German Günter Fruhtrunk, composition formed by diagonal lines that animate in blue, black, green fields the surface, dried in the center by a double white hiatus; to the canvas on which reiterates and varies the pictorial ductus Giorgio Griffa, in the untitled work of 1973: like a scroll of future writing, stretching for almost three meters, waiting to be decrypted. He is echoed by the rhomboid work of the Peruvian artist Jorge Eielson, Orione, dated 1991, a constellation of acrylic painting turned in the sky blue, white and yellow to animate the jute sky. In the middle of the second room of the Gallery, the Grande Odalisca by Alberto Viani, in polished bronze dating from 1974-1975, dialogues with the forms of Aricò.
Other artists present in the exhibition bring new materials into research: their approach is experimental and the new materials enter with arrogance into the ideative and compositional process, indicating new visual paths. Between the late 1950s and 1960s artistic research became fascinated by industrial metals, as demonstrated by Zoltan Kemeny’s 1957 Migration of elements (K 24), a thickening of chromium-plated copper tubes, painted wooden balls and prefabricated elements, shipwrecked in a rough sea, and Pierluca’s 1961 Lacerazione V, a crack of steel and aluminum; are still the metals protagonists in metallic surfaces animated by very fine vibrations that enhance the light incidences in Getulio Alviani, in the Superficie a testura vibratile in 1964,
and in Physichromie n. 407 by Carlos Cruz-Diez dated 1968 which stimulates the viewer’s perception through the completion of coloured plastic elements on aluminium.
Paolo Icaro paints the aluminum in black in Luogo del punto diagonale, 1973, questioning the compositional modalities of the work and Herbert Ferber forms a sculpture that becomes a small monument of metal, in Issoire B of 1978.
Like metal, so plastic materials, which make their seductive entrance into the visual arts at the same time, sung in the hypnotic Le Chant du styrène, a short film advertising on the usefulness of plastic signed by director Alain Resnais in 1958 whose poetic text is written by the French writer and playwright Raymond Queneau: they demonstrate it the Optical dynamic structure of Toni Costa dated 1960, the great Plexiglas by Marco Gastini of 1969, a painting with a high percentage of metal on plexiglass. Plastic in Aldo Mondino condenses in the form of a blue balloon that makes fly on the wall a composition of acrylic and rope on canvas from 1966, while Peter Klasen in Store n. 2 of 1969 takes a roller shutter and lays it on a yellow surface: A test of ardor is required to see the forbidden erotic image that lurks behind it.
In other artists, such as Arturo Bonfanti with the Pavatex, and in Jean Gorin with the masonite, it is the woodwork that represents interesting pictorial research surfaces, destined to flow respectively in AC Murale 153, 1975, and in Composition n. 49, 1959.
Then there is Luciano Bartolini, who has to experiment with every material: his Kleenex su carta of the seventies, his paintings on sandpaper of the late eighties. Giuseppe Maraniello closes the course together with Piero Fogliati because they realize their respective works in 1990 and 2000: the Fleximofono grigio of the second one is proof of his extraordinary inventiveness, while with Gianfranco e Io Maraniello uses more media, mixing up the cards of the matter and opening the door to the new millennium that from February will be hosted in the gallery, with the second stage of the exhibition, dedicated to artists of today.
