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17/1/2006

Marco Gastini, Giorgio Griffa, Paolo Icaro

Barbara Behan Contemporary Art, London

Group Show

Marco Gastini, Giorgio Griffa and Paolo Icaro, authoritative thinkers and practitioners known for their constant research and experimentation, were all born in Turin in the late 1930s. In the second half of the 60s, Turin had a very lively artistic scene, with an abundance of ideas and utopian visions, and they lived these years to the full. By the mid 70s, they had found the grammatical elements to develop their own individual approach that could no longer be classified according to any of the codified trends of the period.

As the leaf turns in the air Boreas Apeliota libeccio brings all three together, and to London, for the first time. The title of the exhibition is deeply representative of their research, symbolizing their single adventure as they have followed their individual paths. Today, in the winter of their experience, in such a different environment to when they started out and among so many new genres of artistic communication, they maintain the primary lesson of grammatical awareness and concern, not without irony nor playful eccentricity, earning themselves a very distinct place amongst the various movements that have emanated from Italy since the 1950s. This exhibition unites the flatness and strokes of Griffa's painting; the explosive jutting canvasses of Gastini as he attempts to conquer space; and the weight, volume and fully independent matter of Icaro's solid forms.

Giorgio Griffa (1936) is one of the most frequently profiled representatives of ‘analytical’* painting and belonged to the echelons of those who were devoted to ‘rescuing painting’ in the early 70s when he exhibited his paintings with horizontal lines in Ileana Sonnabend’s galleries in New York and Paris, Prospekt in Dusseldorf in 1969 and 1973 and the Venice Biennale in 1978 and 1980. Griffa’s work has never shared the typical characteristics and problems that are often found in the category of painting. Composition, for example, does not exist in the traditional ‘finished’ sense but rather sections from a gesture that in principle can be continued infinitely in space and time.

There is no evocation or indication of pictorial or virtual space other than the physical dimension of the canvas and his choice of colours is absolutely arbitrary; the colour that stays on the canvas is simply the trace of an operation. For this exhibition, Griffa presents recent paintings that share the conceptual premises of his early works, without the purism and minimilistic reduction, consisting of stripes, lines, tracks, logos and commas, ‘painted’ freehand on unstretched, unframed and unprimed linen, nettle cloth and burlap. The paintings, pinned throughout the exhibition with a handful of nails, are presented exactly as they came into being, including the regular folds arising from the storage of the cloth. Equally important to the frankness with regard to the material is that toward the viewer. The sparsity of the traces on the canvas emphasizes the void and offers the viewer a large space for his participation.

Marco Gastini (1938), who has participated twice at the Venice Biennale, in 1928 and 1982, also has a background in ‘analytical’ or ‘radical’ painting. Here he presents a new cycle of works, recently exhibited at CAMeC Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, La Spezia, that recall and draw on his activity in the 70s, when his points of light, lines and small signs on Plexiglas gave his paintings their own energy, namely to immobilize tension and to render it on the canvas. Space is singularly the most important element and outcome for Gastini. Space, energy, tension and, like Griffa, participation. Little importance is attached to the finished piece. The distance between the work and the viewer is an extension of the composition itself, as one reacts with the other, making action, space, thought and time coincide as much as possible.

The primacy of materials such as glass, carobs, terracotta, slate and copper in his current work emphasize the evocation of the four primary elements: water, air, fire and earth, and add a fragmentary quality that achieves a new spatiality. In working different materials and elements, the form of the support that was once a perfect square in Aperion (2005) becomes irregular and is emphasized with the rethinking of the minimal signs from the 70s. In S.T. 99 (1999/2005) and Untitled (2004) Gastini eliminates the support, fusing glass, slate and paint directly to the wall and once more shaping the space of the gallery.

Paolo Icaro (1936), currently exhibiting in ‘Italian Sculpture of the 20th Century’ at Arnaldo Pomodoro Fondation, Milan, came to prominence with his first solo exhibition at Schneider Gallery, Rome in 1960 and his participation in Germano Celant’s exhibition ‘Arte Povera. Im spazio’ at Bertesca Gallery, Genoa in 1967. Icaro makes use of objects, drawings and words to transfer his primary elementary experiences into reality. His explorative research leads him to unexpected territories as he projects his form-giving process into space, obliging considerable involvement and analysis from the viewer by means of fragmentation, nuances and intuition. This exhibition presents a series of installations from 1975 to 2006. Icaro's early investigation into measures of geometry: locating elemental situations about the concept of line and point, and our perception of it, opened the road for him to use his body in an attempt to measure his own reality. Measure (1975) is an installation of two white painted chairs, separated by a steel measure one meter apart. Icaro's body is the instrument which supplies the data, a relative measure derived from daily movements as his arms spread apart in an unconstrained manner.

Splinters (1985) and Spiette (‘Spies’ 1991) consist of plaster, Icaro’s material of choice, in dialogue with other materials like iron and fragmented glass. Plaster’s ambiguous nature: liquid and solid, resistant to time and instantly fragile, captures the gesture of the moment of conception and contains hidden clues to the past. Icaro’s numerous years working on and off in the United States, exhibiting at prominent New York galleries, particularly Jack Tilton, has had a great influence on how his art dialogues with trends in contemporary American art. The playful aspect in his work was not - and today continues not to be - an expressive goal but a methodological instrument of analysis and research born out of the years of 'Arte Povera' (Poor Art) and the internationalization of aesthetic thought. Aerial Rights 2002, an installation of plaster fragments and two steel cages and Internet 2006, consisting of steel mesh and a drawing directly on the gallery’s wall, bear witness to the ironical and amused spirit that appears throughout Icaro's work.

Opening: January 18

Barbara Behan Contemporary Art
50 Moreton Street - London

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