Giuliano Barbanti : Asymmetric Harmonies

Thursday 22 May the exhibition a-symmetric harmonies dedicated to Giuliano Barbanti, master of the abstract art that, from the end of the Seventies, dedicated himself to a project research and has worked on the sign and the intensity of chromatic stamps, first on the gray-shaped surface and, later, he started a study on colour in anticipation of his abstract-geometric extensions. The exhibition may be considered fully an anthological show since it is a research on the production of the artist retracing his work of more than forty years. The first personal show of Giuliano Barbanti at Lorenzelli Arte (at the times it was Gallery Lorenzelli) was in 1975 and it was the first of a series of presences in the gallery of the artist, with personal and group exhibitions that marked a durable and fruitful collaboration. 


The main constant factor in my work – claims Barbanti in an interview last year – I think is truly the love for art in the full freedom of experimenting all that my sensitivity and my intuitions retain necessary for a possible renewal, in the defence of my expressive authenticity. 

A research that never finds an ending but only a beginning, the principle of a new investigation that fathoms the idea that generates the painting with the inherent instruments in the potential of colour and the structure. The canvases exhibited are the representation of his art, performed in its beauty and its constant progress. 

In the Seventies The artist started from a reduction at zero of the pictorial fact with the deleting of the heavy mixture of colour and oil, and he appealed to an extremely cold and impersonal medium as that of the acrylic colour sprayed with a airbrush. Wrote Gillo Dorfles in his text for the personal show of Giuliano Barbanti in 1975. 

In the Eighties, the colour entering his works, is welcomed by the artist with appalling awareness which succeeds to dialogue with the gray hues without screaming, without unbalancing but in fact creating a new geometry. From 1992, laving behind the airbrush, he dedicates himself to complex and coloured surfaces, crest of the colour and the structure. 

The works of Barbanti posses, beyond the composed precision, a component of mystery due to the unnerving relationship between the geometric construction and the perceived expansiveness of the fading out. “This aspect –explains the artist- even became clearer to me when at the interior of these surfaces I started to insert some unbalancing elements that immediately revealed to be dialectically “a-symmetric”: the marks that accentuated the seperations, the obliqueness of the articulations, the cut of the intensity in the painted backgrounds. In a certain way the previous reducing strictness helped me to proceed with more confidence in this new phase of research, because beyond the perceptive factor, I succeeded to individualize the most meaningful meanings. 

In occasion of the exhibition a catalogue will be published including texts by Roberto Borghi, Elena Forin and Ivan Quaroni with an complete bibliography and the publication of about a hundred of works in colour. 

We would like to recall that at the exhibition “Born in the Thirties” currently at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan (exhibition in addition to the on dedicated to Manzoni at Palazzo Reale) a work of Giuliano Barbanti of 1974 is exhibited.