ABC-ARTE presents a concise dialogue between the works of the avantgarde masters presented in the gallery’s recent programme: Giorgio Griffa and Arnaldo Pomodoro.
The painting of Giorgio Griffa is based more on the interrelation of the elements than on the procedure, and in line with the Italian tradition it has a sense of beauty derived from the poetic, the sensuality of the colours and the seduction of the forms. Griffa’s mode of action, his very human differentiated and modular repetitions of the fundamentals of painterly discourse (point, line, surface, material) are very close to the conditioned reflex and practical habitude whose roots lie in the very physiology of painting.
In occasion of ArtMonte-carlo 2022 Giorgio Griffa will be represented by a rich selection of works dated from 1979 to 2000 to show the development of the sign and of writing in his colour down to the present.
For Arnaldo Pomodoro the sign counts in itself, distilled in a plastic unit where nothing matters except graphein degree zero. The artist’s hypothesis of the sign has a structural value, in which formal identity is achieved by the weaving and unfolding of the spatial development in time in a fully and exclusively plastic dimension.
The sign does not go beyond offering itself, establishing an open, unforeseeable, radiant environment in a mood akin to that which regards every manmade object as a text, from an incised tablet to sculpture and architecture, and as a sign every condensation of thought begins to be determined concretely as an essential formative passage in the absence of any possible codification and any signifying intention.
From Pomodoro’s recent one-man show in ABC-ARTE will be exhibited La Colonna del viaggiatore, 1960-61 and the eight sculpted leaves of Frammento, 2004, perfect synthesis and clear indication of a method that Pomodoro affirms as his very own through the taut, dynamically woven fabric of signs and the intellectual and amicable indications of the dedications.
The present critical reappraisal of the work of two among the most popular postwar Italian artists has brought them to the attention of the major international museum institutions as well as private and public collections.
