On 26 February ABC-ARTE opens the new season with the inauguration of the one-man show of Giorgio Griffa Un mondo astratto non basta (An abstract world is not enough).
Genoa is renewing its contact with the Turin-born artist, one of the most significant of the postwar generation. Particularly important among his shows have been those held in the 1970s in the Galleria Bertesca and Samangallery, and in the 1980s in the Samangallery, La Polena and Studio Bonifacio.
An abstract world is not enough follows on from the one-man show held by ABC-ARTE in 2015 Esonerare il mondo [To relieve the world], curated by Ivan Quaroni, and the group exhibition hosted in 2018 Absolute Painting. Giorgio Griffa, Tomas Rajlich, Jerry Zeniuk, curated by Flaminio Gualdoni.
The selection of some forty works is focused on a nucleus of historic works from the 1970s in which, in line with Analytical Painting and the explorations of Arte Povera, Griffa conducted a personal exploration leading to a transcendence of the traditional concepts of painting and the identification of a new form of conscience. 'I do not represent anything, I paint' is the statement of his poetic expressed in 1972. Since then, his art has failed to provide certainties and has been a continuous questioning of painting, its intrinsic intelligence, and its redefinition.
For Griffa, painting is an action that presents itself as the totality around which we can reflect, a means not an end, and one that is connected with other fields of knowledge such as philosophy, science and music.
The inauguration of the exhibition will be accompanied by the presentation of a new monograph on Griffa published by ABC-ARTE with an interview-dialogue between Leonardo Caffo and the artist which originated in a long exchange of letters (from which the title of the exhibition is taken) and a critical essay by Alberto Fiz.
Giorgio Griffa
Un mondo astratto non basta
26 Febrary - 24 April 2021
ABC-ARTE
Via XX Settembre 11/A Genova
T.010.86.83.884
Un mondo astratto non basta
Giorgio Griffa in conversation with Leonardo Caffo
Caffo.The abstract world is not enough, but perhaps today more than ever we realise that the abstract is a form of the patently concrete, tangible, almost tactile. The world has never been as virtual as it is today; among the digital clouds, primary structures as forms and colours seem to be all that takes place. Colour, in fact, represented as a pure form of the intellect still seems to be something mysterious to us. Wittgenstein defines the science that seeks to understand what the pure ideas are that form the grammar of vision as a 'mathematics of colour'. I thought that, basically, this idea of Wittgenstein would fit much of your work (from Segni primari [primary signs] to the analysis of Sezione aurea [golden section]) perfectly. If I say 'colour', we are bound to think of an abstract idea that only takes on form in the concrete.
So let's start here. What comes to mind when I say the word 'colour'? Do you agree with this definition of Wittgenstein? It is on the tightrope between the abstract and the concrete, where colour seems to be something privileged, that we find that 'trace of life' of Yves Klein: 'Long live the virtual!'.
Griffa. Yes, long live the virtual. Science with quantitative mechanics and philosophy with Wittgenstein and Nietzsche (as a philosopher, you can tell me if I am wrong here) have reopened a vast pasture of the unknown that the West seemed to have filed away, relegating it to the 'primitive' peoples, though they were not primitive when it came to thought and not technology.
The arts, which have always drawn on what is not material, resume that dialogue that had been interrupted when the West began to pay the price of an immense scientific and technological development, reducing the person to a mere economic subject.
It is not by chance that Schopenhauer wrote 'My Orient' at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while colonial exploitation was becoming widespread on the pretext of cultural superiority. Although thanks to Romanticism, of which I am not particularly fond, we have regained that lost unity of the material and the non-material, of the known and the unknown, of being and non-being, of Yin and Yang.
The vast energy of the universe, which operates as an unimaginable intelligence through imperceptible particles that only appear when they are active, comprises not only stones, trees and living beings, but all the thoughts of everyone. This is the title of my exhibition currently on show in Spoleto Museum.
The mark of the brush on the canvas and the passage of that immense, undifferentiated universal energy into that fragment of material energy that is given substance in the mark.
Caffo. This energy, which in philosophy reminds me of the theory of shared intellect of Averroes, seems to appear practically everywhere in your work. The continuous coming into being of marks understood as black holes, the fields that are charged with an immense energy like that of Dionysus, are certainly something that has a very privileged and critical relation with the present. You spoke of this 'immense price' of progress and of techno-industrial society, and your scepticism vis-à-vis the internet already seemed to play a large part during our first meeting. Yet, at bottom, the internet is this very non-material, undifferentiated energy that can be crystallised in a mark and originated as a dream of a shared intellect. So have things gone wrong? Perhaps. The point, and here comes my second question for you, is that not all marks have the same value when they try to crystallise the energy that gives rise to them. Is there an ethic within this aesthetic of energy that you are talking about?
Griffa. I would say that, with its capacity to collect billions of data in a storehouse that does not exist, without space or time, virtual, the internet helps me to consider Gilgamesh and Apollo as real from the single fact of being thought. It would be absurd to deny them just because we do not find them in the material world.
Our era has only just opened an immense gateway, perhaps comparable only to the two major inventions of the past, namely metals and writing. The contraries coexist here, there are margins to recover an obviously different richness, that of archaic man, who became aware in the time of Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Thales and Heraclitus, the birth of philosophy, and the successive centuries.
The shrunken homo œconomicus of our recent times has to regain that lost unity of spirit and matter, must pick up the tracks that reason indicates to transcend it, must abandon the spirit of dominating the world and others, which has become dangerous because the instruments are too powerful.
Yes. I believe there is a strong ethical necessity that I had not dwelt on until today. The arts have continued to enter the unknown since the era of Orpheus. And the unknown is that part of reality which we cannot identify. Ethics, in turn, is non-material though anything but unknown, it is also a part of the reality which we all have to take into account, including the arts.
Caffo. At this point I think it would be wrong, since it is an unprecedented moment for you, not to dwell for a moment on this question of ethics. Your work is anything but as Cartesian as it might appear: there is not the intellect on the one hand and the corporeal on the other. In their apparent abstraction, colours and forms seem to generate an idea of the world very different from that of the conflict, epidemics and ecological crises that we are obliged to experience today. If a colour and a form can depend on their coming into being, without assuming any stable form, this means that there is a respect for the fragility of indecision, and that it is a moral form. This is what I see when I look at a lot of your work, because if there is a process that never arrives at a stable form, then there is a respect for this process. Nevertheless, it is true that aesthetics is ethics, as Wittgenstein claimed in his lecture on ethics: they are both not only non-material, but above all incommensurable. What idea of the real moral world lies behind the abstract world of aesthetics?
Griffa. I'm not sure that I can follow you and I rely on your patience and on the patience of the reader.
In my opinion, it is always a question of rational trajectories, of a reason that is not necessarily Cartesian and yet for us Westerners is always a child of Descartes. Even poetry is a child of reason, a kind reason that is receptive to everything it cannot regulate. I would like to quote from Calvino's American Lessons, but I'm not sure of the text.
Until yesterday there were the animate world and the inanimate world. Painting took materials and transferred them to the animate world, gave them the capacity to transport knowledge, emotion, ecstasy, even the spatio-temporal shock of the Stendhal syndrome. The mountains were stable forms for billions of years, a flower for a few hours.
And still, cattle continue to give birth and stones continue to be unable to give birth, but our reason has discovered through science that there is a hidden universe in which all is life, process, the particles move, collide, fuse, generate, are born and die everywhere, even in the mountains and the flowers. Time and space are the coordinates of our dimension but they are no longer the fixed tracks of the Newtonian universe.
What has all this to do with ethics? My reply can only concern the specific ethics of my work, not a general ethics with its spaces everywhere, from religion to politics and everyday life.
It is a question of the choice, among its infinite aspects, of painting as a knowledge process, a choice that perhaps, though it is not for me to say, may be aesthetic and ethical at the same time.
Caffo. At this point, allow me to take a less conceptual step backwards. What forms of material knowledge compose the virtual archipelago? Which meetings, persons, masters, places have been central in your life? You mentioned Calvino, I am thinking of his lightness and his way of telling the story of Perseus and Medusa: on wings 'to climb onto' what is heavy in order to transform it into something light. How Pegasus is born, the beauty of the paradox of a cow who gives birth to a stone. Who are the faces who have 'lightened' your journey?
Griffa. I find it difficult to go back in my memory and I am not used to doing it. In a recent text on my 11 cycles of painting, I recalled when, around the age of fifteen, I went into the square to listen to the Agit-Prop of the Communist party and on my way home I passed the USIS American bookshop to see the painting of New York. And I recalled how in the same years I had a genuine revelation in front of a painting by Mondrian. I reply by mentioning the fundamental books I read: Ulysses and the Cantos, but also Gargantua and Pantagruel, and besides Joyce and Pound, Eliot's The Waste Land and Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. I made a work recently about the latter, while on Eliot I have a project that I hope to complete in the next few months.
As you can see, a lot of poetry, but also the popular books on oriental thought that began to appear in the 1950s, the moving discovery of the beauty of Zen, the Vedas, the Tao. And the writings and thoughts on the art of Matisse that made me grow up. They were followed by popular works on science, Capra, Feymann, Rovelli, and lots, lots more. I am a sedentary nomad who travels across the written pages.
Then the people, starting with Aldo Mondino who introduced me to contemporary art when we were still kids, Alighiero and Anne Marie Boetti, Filiberto Menna, Paolo Fossati, Maurizio Fagiolo, Germano Celant, my teacher Filippo Scroppo, Claudio Olivieri, Carlo Battaglia, Claudio Verna, Marco Gastini like a brother and Sperone accompanied by Arte Povera, in line with Anselmo, Penone and Zorio. As a solitary person, I never went to try to meet poets and writers, I preferred to read them.
Caffo. I was thinking, while you were talking about this idea of solitary beings, about your series on three lines with arabesque. It seems obvious to me that the interesting thing is the absence of hierarchy and the tendency toward the infinite, but there's something else: these parallel lines, by definition, will never converge. In the reply you have just given me there is a kind of underlying idea that the ideas in parallel count more than the often forced associations between individuals that these ideas have produced. We have all jointly decided to call this exhibition of yours 'An abstract world is not enough', perhaps also convinced that the essential task is not to contrast the abstract with a presumed concrete, but to do rather as you have done in your work, destroying the difference between the line, the traditional means of tracing a figure, and colour as a means of filling in this form. It is a fictive distinction, depending on the width of the brush, exactly as the line separating the abstract from the concrete is fictive. Your motto 'I do not represent anything, I paint' is famous. Are you still so sure? It seems to me that in an explicit and tangible way you have represented a world made of extremely concrete energies.
Griffa. For some time I have considered that the figurative/abstract polemic has damaged both Italian art and the lives of many artists. I painted figures until I felt that they had become superfluous and at this point I simply abandoned them. That I do not represent anything can mean don't give me too much importance, it can also mean that I don't use images. It's an inevitable contradiction because one would like not to represent the part of the world that cannot be represented, the hidden part, but painting is by definition representation and, and all things considered, the marks that it produces are also images, figures.
Here too the contradiction is not superable with a logical device, but with an act of life, the act of painting.
When Matisse faced the problem of the conflict between line and colour and invented the cut-outs, I do not believe he resolved the problem because cutting with a pair of scissors becomes in some way a line, but he has constructed a fantastic, supreme oeuvre worthy of the whole life of a great artists. And he was eighty years old.
Somewhere I wrote that the difference between line and colour, in my view, depends on the width of the brush and the way it is used, I would say the reason, the abstract ideas is not divorced from the action. In some way it has some similarity to what happens when the undifferentiated energy of the world is crystallised in the particles and these construct a cow and a stone, or a line and a colour.
And in this latter case the representation coincides with the event.
Look, an abstract world is not enough, abstraction too is a real event, thanks to the particles even the virtual world is a tangible world, all the thoughts of everybody are a part of reality, the marks of the brush are as real as stones and cows. So reality of spirit and matter, indissolubly united in the arts, otherwise we wouldn't be able to understand how a sound, a word, a mark can illuminate us with immensity.
Nothing new, rather something very old.
Let's take a small step further. Since it is probable that the primary energy of the world is not spatial or temporal,there where there is no before and after, and not even a there, the event is enriched because it passes from an indeterminate state to our spatio-temporal configuration.
And I ask myself whether that strong continuity that I feel in the history of art, in spite of the very big differences between one time and another and one place and another, is due to the scent, that cannot be more than a scent, of that original state of indefinite energy in which there are neither before and after, nor here and there, nor time and space.
Caffo. 'What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence'. It is well known that the seventh, ultimate proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus drives philosophy into a mysticism that, according to many and as I find in this last and wonderful reply of yours, hands it over to art. There is an unrepresentable of the world that we must nevertheless try, in some peculiar way, to represent within the paradox of the 'final things'. The big questions of meaning, certainly, but also, as you suggested, this indefinite energy external to the mediocre temporal line that we have adopted. Your work travels, like the lines and colours you propose, between many worlds: the latest physics, the philosophy of becoming, literature. If possible, I don't want to reduce this interview or dialogue to a banal and simple corollary of another - in your words there is the desire to say something so urgent and yet so obvious: there is no sensible thought that is not translated into a form of life. For me, an artist is not only his works (and here, please, give me a moment to explain what I mean): it is his modus operandi, the form of life and the capacity to follow an almost private rule and a discipline vis-à-vis the world into which he has been thrown, and with which he is bound, almost by nature, to be in conflict. I use the phrase 'form of life', so welcomed - and not by chance - by a tradition stretching from Augustine to Wittgenstein. What lies behind a form of life like yours?
Griffa. I am surprised by the relevance of your reference to Augustine and Wittgenstein to my way of working. Paolo Fossati once said to me that every day I went 'à la Trappe'. The icon of the wayward genius does not match me. I have a life happily regulated by the necessities of work, home and studio, studio and home, early to bed. I have had to work all my life, I've also had a different profession, but I have never accepted the idea of work as a punishment. On the contrary, I regard work as the supreme, extraordinary invention of humanity. From the amygdala to the computer, man has constructed and continues to construct his world and to realise himself through work.
Yes, there is a certain conflict with work as nothing but a means of earning a living, money as compensation for the effort. There's nothing wrong with the reward, but it's not the essence, as it seems to me to be for one-dimensional homo oeconomicus.
A discipline, no, a discipline imposed by one's own work is not a limitation of freedom but its realisation. The abstract idea of liberty in the pure state, self-sufficient, can become an alibi for the worst slavery, violence.
Let's return to the undifferentiated energy of the universe that becomes a particle, the particle that works and becomes a cow or a stone. I see a general plan in which idea cannot be separated from action. And work seems to me to fit perfectly into this reading.
Caffo. OK, let's return to this energy. But this time I want to be a bit more direct. When you speak of 'general plan', are you referring to God? What is your relation with the final cause? If you imagine God, what is it like?
Griffa. I don't think that the arts can provide answers, they are limited to opening the door and you have to settle your own affairs yourself. Religions, on the other hand, are a response to the human need to give an identity to everything, including the unknown. If I'm not mistaken, in India the Brahman - I think that is the name of the fundamental principle - cannot have any definition, an indistinct identity, and so I think that is why hundreds of divinities have sprung up there, so that every one of us can find what he needs in the unknown and enter into harmony with those tangible aspects closest to his mode of being, that is, the individual divinities. We draw resolution, consolation, confidence, vital energy from that part of the world that we do not know.
I think all the religions deserve great respect for this function of theirs and for the others connected with it. I don't know whether this idea of mine of a general plan comes from my religious education or from the more recent scientific discoveries that attest the presence of an unreachable intelligence, generalised from microcosm to macrocosm, and to a large extent mysterious.
In the present state we can hypothesise the dance of the microscopic particles, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a millimetre or less. That dance gives birth to fiery stars and cold planets, entire galaxies, black holes, dark matter, nuclear explosions and permafrost, as well as sea and sky, mountains and valleys, trees and fruit, people and animals, fantastically complex organisms, as well as bridges and railways, ships and aeroplanes, towns and villages, and also thoughts and memories and the profound, bottomless unconscious in each of us, and Mozart and Dante, Heraclitus and Newton, the Divina Commedia and the Nozze di Figaro, the Parthenon and the pyramids, and you can go on when you have a sleepless night.
I don't feel the need to give a name and identity to this unapproachable intelligence. Painting has no need of it, precisely because the arts are limited to opening the door.
Caffo. Perhaps it is excessive to drag it in here, but I was thinking of the theory of language games formulated by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953). We think we can give names to things and that this is language, but in fact our linguistic competence is much more tied to usage and thus expresses, once again, a form of life. It is complex, but perhaps, as you suggested, it is now necessary to try to exist without giving any name to many essential things in our forms of the world. 'If a lion could talk, we would not understand him'. A lion, in this sense, is no different from God. Even if a God could take the trouble of saying something to us, I'm afraid it follows from our idea of him that we wouldn't be able to understand him: the unsubtle mind is limited, constrained within the cage of reason, or of the reply that Franco Battiato gave me in an interview about the meaning of his music that is just like the one you gave to me just now; I thought that, perhaps, all those who are looking for an expressive road without taking the trouble to make it taxonomic arrive at similar conclusions. It's up to us to treasure a sort of principle of indetermination that is not only physical but also, perhaps above all, metaphysical. What are you working on at the moment and how does this principle affect your current work?
Griffa. I am working on three cycles at the same time, now one and now another without any order. They are the Golden Canon cycle with the number of Euclid that will never end and begins again on every canvas; the Shaman cycle with incomprehensible words without identity (for example OKUROTUMOZ); and the Dilemma cycle in which opposites coexist (for example DAVANTIDIETRO [frontback]).
Once upon a time we used to write in Latin, now I write in Italian and English. And strangely, the written words have become images themselves with some distant analogy with the form of oriental writing. The harmony with which Battiato replied to you confirms my opinion that all the arts have a common basis. You are right, the principle of indetermination is not confined to science.
Caffo. Thank you, Giorgio.
The rules of the game
Alberto Fiz
Iononrappresentonullaiodipingo [I don't represent anything, I paint] is the programmatic phrase pronounced by Giorgio Griffa on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name organised in 1972 in the Godel Gallery in Rome. And in 2021 this famous declaration still rings true: 'The primary marks, the contaminations and each of the eleven cycles that I have produced link me with the phase of the passage from latent energy to the idea' (1). Almost fifty years have passed since that distant 1972, the world is no longer the same, but eleven cycles later, Griffa's action has lost none of its lucidity or far-sightedness. On the contrary, today that silent, apparently isolated gesture of 'assisting the colour within the canvas' assumes its full provocative vitality. Ever since the end of the 1960s (his first one-man show was in 1968 in the Martano Gallery in Turin) Griffa has been freeing painting from its ancillary status vis-à-vis representation, but without turning his back on its infinite possibilities and implications. In this way he avoided eventually becoming swallowed up by the practice that was widespread down to the mid-1970s when painting was subjected to a progressive nullification. To be acceptable, it had to be as neutral and objective as possible, renouncing a part of its own specificity - in short, a residual painting dominated by the non-gesture.
Griffa participated in the experience of analytic painting and radically modified its approach to the media: he did not demand an act of submission from painting, nor did he subject it to the rigid rationalist cure based on the guidelines of Sol Lewitt, but allowed it to become action, to take shape on the canvas through the mediation of the artist as witness. He himself is the instrument of the painting, the mediator (a recent cycle bears the significant title Sciamano [shaman]) who assumes a listening attitude, without the desire to commit an abuse of power. The act of painting absorbs the totality in constant transformation in the awareness that 'every mark of the brush is a real phenomenon, every piece of the canvas is a piece of reality' (2). All that implies an essential instability with regard to a non-definitive process that is in ongoing transformation, a constant approximation. Not by chance, quasi dipinto [nearly painted] is the emblematic definition that Griffa gave to one of his first groups of works in 1968. The surface was covered only partially, at times only the smallest part, refusing to pursue a line leading to the infinite where what counts is to occupy the space. 'My unfinished has assumed an unexpected potency with time, it means leaving out of the canvas the full stop that, like the full stop at the end of this sentence, consigns it to a moment in the past'. (3)
They are possible routes, plausible hypotheses, filaments that belong to the chain of an imaginary DNA where everything is connected but, at the same time, each element can be conveyed on its own, maintaining a paradoxical autonomy.
In a first phase, Griffa used primary marks arranged on the canvas in an orderly pattern: vertical, oblique, horizontal. In other cases, the sequences are formed by dots, commas, imprints of a finger, brush or spatula. They are reiterated marks, different every time, that belong to collective memory and which it is the artist's job to transfer to the surface without the imposition of any hierarchy. Each paratactic element becomes part of the process, including the canvas without a frame, which with its imperfections leaves its mark on the final result. It is the painting that assumes command of operations, refusing to be dragged along in anonymity as was often the case in the palimpsest of the 1960s and 1970s. The marks belong to all (Tutti i pensieri di tutti [all the thoughts of all]) is the title of the exhibition held in Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto in 2020). They contain, in a nutshell, the memory of painting reactivated by the action of the artist, party to the case of a process that is refractory to a narcissistic and self-referential component. 'I prefigure the oblivion of myself' (3), Griffa affirms, proposing an age-old, well-matured project in which the expanded mark involves the entire multitude, as witness the title of a one-man show in the L'Isola Gallery in Roma: 30.000 anni di memoria [30,000 years of memory].
So painting is matter in action that reacts in contact with the surface and expresses an energy of its own, like that of lead or wax. It envisages an entropic process of modification, participating directly in the cognitive act and, although it answers to an ancient conscience, the use to which Griffa puts it has many points in common with Arte Povera, a phenomenon with its epicentre in Turin that coincided with Griffa's first public appearances. The artist remembered the convergences on the occasion of one of his exhibitions in the Salzano Gallery in Turin in 2000: 'A twisted piece of leather produces a strong energy to return to its free state, a tree imprisoned by an iron hand modifies its growth in order to enclose the object which no longer becomes foreign to it, an element combined in a chemical reaction generates energy for an indefinite time. The intelligence of the material was not used as an instrument of new formal syntheses, however inevitable, but became the protagonist of the work with the artist's hand at its service. By analogy, convinced as I am of the intelligence of painting, I have put my hand at the service of the colours that met the canvas and limited my intervention to the simple action of moving the brush' (4).
Painting can acquire a level of participatory conscience that goes beyond its formal status. This is why, contrary to what one might think, the primary marks represent a dynamic linguistic praxis, far from a conceptual tautology fixed in time. They are particles that form part of an almost infinite series of combinations, leading to an exploration that is transformed in all its transitions but maintains unaltered such basic elements as rhythm (but one could also hypothesise rituality), sequence, incompleteness. The variations on a theme in the score open up to new scenarios in which the painting itself suggests the changes: 'They are simple physiological variations between various trajectories, they are different paths in the same dark forest' (5). This is all evident in the one-man exhibition un mondo astratto non basta in the ABC-ARTE Gallery in Genoa: a synthesis of more than fifty works from the period from 1969 to 1987, most of them from the 1970s. As the title suggests, this retrospective focuses on the fundamental question of the relation between reality and painting as an essential existence: 'To do things with images is not the same as to make images. It means making use of images to unearth the infinite poetic possibilities latent in the world' (6).
The artist is part of the whole within a process in which the action interferes directly with the phenomenon. In this sense Griffa appropriates the uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg, taking it from the scientific plane and applying it to the artistic one. The phenomenon of painting is intrinsically variable and is modified by the action applied to it in an interaction between the self and the world: 'The principle of Heisenberg', Griffa has written in an illuminating essay, 'evidently belongs within the relation between man and the world, it is not a definition of the world, it does not concern the structure of matter, but the structure of the observation of matter […] This gives rise to the dynamic of a relation of continuous to-and-fro between the free invention of matter and the verification of experience, a reciprocal ping-pong rather than a one-directional game' (7). The primary marks, therefore, are not inert ('puritan', Griffa calls them), but contain the memory of painting in action. The artist develops this potential by allowing each element to take up a position in a different way, accelerating the infinitely variable flows of information. No less than eleven cycles succeed one another without any break in continuity down to the present, with progressive contaminations, interferences, fragmentations, superpositions, stratifications. 'Sometimes I enjoy hiding the primary marks somewhere. There's nothing mummified in my painting, whose job it is to reactivate the memory', Griffa said to me. At the age of eighty-five, he moves with agility and irony around his canvases, stealthily observing them and still capable of being surprised. Every series seems to contain the preceding ones on the basis of that principle of complementarity formalised by Heisenberg. In the face of the acquisition of new data, reality comes alive and renounces part of its ascetic order to accommodate disparate individualities. The logic of contaminations prevails in the cosmology created by Griffa from the second half of the 1970s, although there were already pointers in this direction in 1968, as shown, for example, by a work like Dall'alto e da destra incrociato [crossed from the top and from the right]. Besides representing a specific cycle, that logic is the thread running through all the later explorations of the primary marks: 'Straight lines coexist with broken ones, curves, broader marks, squares and rectangles, like an oak tree near a chestnut, and each species is composed of individuals that are different from one another' (8). Take Alter Ego, Frammenti, Segno e Campo, Tre linee con arabesco [alter ego, fragments, mark and field, three lines with arabesque]. In the latter, Griffa unites the ornamental element, finally permitted after the authorisation of Matisse, with three otherwise unidentified lines. The simplified structure of the composition hides, however, an infinity of other elements that refer to the entire repertoire of marks of Griffa, a sedentary nomad who, like a character in Fellini, always carries his luggage of memories with him. Inclusion always prevails over exclusion in a process of ontogenesis that every time seems to reiterate entirely its creative trajectorywhere the memory of the painting is blended with that of the artist. Tre linee con arabesco introduces a fresh element, number, already present in the title, which from then on will become part of his alphabet of marks, anticipating the successive entry of letters and of language. It is an element with a function, serving to list the works identified in a chronological succession. All the same, if on the one hand the act of archiving assumes a rational and explicitly documentary aspect, on the other numbers, in their incessant sequences, become enigmatic and are dispersed in the cosmos. To understand the numbering, it would be necessary to bring together the entire series in a single place, which is obviously impossible. So when Tre linee con arabesco are presented, we find ourselves faced with illogical, seemingly fortuitous sequences, dissolving the initial logic at its root according to a hidden rule known only to the artist. The scientific-philosophical paradox appears even more evident in the cycle Canone aureo [golden ratio], in which Griffa makes use of the mysterious irrational algebraic number 1.618033…, the formula of the divine proportion at the origin of beauty since the era of the pyramids but that does not have a precise correlate in mathematics. As in the case of quantum mechanics, it can be applied but not defined: 'From the perspective of time, that number has a history of some 2,300 years and will go on for centuries, millennia, millions of millennia, without ever stopping, until the end of time. It's a way of getting to know the infinite through the modest presence of a small number' (9).
There is no formal or simply aesthetic passage in his work; everything is developed within a database composed of lines, marks, chromatic fields, numbers and letters ready to flare up in the unforeseen moment according to a logic dominated by the unknown: 'The primary mark bears with it the mystery of its becoming without veiling it with the representation of material reality' (10) - in short, un mondo astratto non basta. With his fragmentary and fragmented, ineffable and courageous exploration, Griffa confronts us with the profound contradictions of contemporary reality.
(1), G. Griffa, Undici cicli, Allemandi Editore, Turin 2021, in press..
(2) G. Griffa, ibidem.
(3) G. Griffa, Post Scriptum, Hopefulmonster, Turin 2005, p.137.
(3) G. Griffa, op. cit.
(4) G. Griffa, Intelligenza della Materia, galleria Salzano, Turin, 2000.
(5) G. Griffa, op. cit.
(6) G. Griffa, Giorgio Griffa, Silvana editoriale-Galleria Fumagalli, Milan 2005, p.125.
(7) G. Griffa, Il principio di indeterminazione, Maestri Incisori editore, Milan 1994, p.6.
(8) G, Griffa, op. cit.
(9) G. Griffa, Giorgio Griffa. La Divina Proporzione, Studio Guastalla Arte Moderna e Contemporanea/Edizioni Graphis Arte, Milan 2010, p.8.
(10) G. Griffa, op. cit.
