Giorgio Griffa: Silence: let the painting speak

Silence; Let the Painting Speak is yet another homage to Giorgio Griffa at Lorenzelli Arte. It opens on Thursday, March 12th. , the seventh one-man show by the Turin artist at Lorenzelli Arte, an artist whom the gallery has always paid particular attention to. The numerous exhibitions proposed by the gallery from the mid-1970s to now testify to this. 

Giorgio Griffa is a major abstract painter and one of the most creative exponents of Analytical Painting (Painting Painting), a movement born at the end of the 1960s. It is with the work from that period that this show opens, a show that presents over fifty pieces that cover the years 1968 – 1978; surely his most interesting and significant, not only in the notable size of pieces, but, above all, in their intrinsic quality of absolute importance due their innate sublimity and the seminal quality of the investigation into artistic expression.  

Giorgio Griffa's pieces are free hanging canvases “un-constricted” by stretchers, in which color becomes the vehicle of an action and the marks the effect of a thought. They are contradistinguished by their essential formal compositions; marks, lines, strips, arabesques (pale at times), along with uniform fields of color painted directly onto the raw canvas; a painting of powerful immediacy, vivacity and luminosity that is executed without hesitancy and with great emotionality.  

It is non-referential work that aims at the substantial elements of painting; color expressed through primary decorative motifs and space that is an integral part of the pictorial composition. 

The stretcher-less canvases are hung directly onto the walls; the willing distancing from the classical elements of painting evokes the idea of movement; the extension of the painting across the space that surrounds it. It is minimal and conceptual art pushed toward the in between of the finite and infinite. In his special approach to painting Griffa has experimented with the Golden Canon that defines “a small number that fixes the idea of the immense” that, in these pieces, appears in the form of an interrupted mark after a variable number of digits. Griffa writes: “Painting has a long memory of that which is other than itself. The Golden Section belongs to this memory. It is not only painting and architecture, it is mathematics, it is philosophy; its never-ending number drives deep into the unknown and lays down a bridge utilizing the knowledge and emotions of our time.” The mathematical multiplication of the Golden Number is, for the artist, a representation of the possibility of delving into the depths of indefinite and unknowable space. Griffa's multiplied marks arrange themselves into a rhythm of natural growth, with infinite variations and the mysterious meanings of a poetic dialogue with the unknown. 

A bilingual monograph has been published on the occasion of this exhibition, with reproductions of all the work in the show, a critical text by Ivan Quaroni and comments by Giorgio Griffa himself.