Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is proud to present
Pittura-Percezione
Calderara, Casentini, Iacchetti, Lombardi
Opening: Thursday, May 9th, 2024, 6.30 pm
From May 10th through to June 22nd, 2024
From Tuesday to Saturday, from 3.00 pm to 7.00
Curated by Andrea Daffra
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is glad to present Painting-Perception, a collective show curated by Andrea Daffra, who creates a dialogue among four Italian abstract artists such as Antonio Calderara, Marco Casentini, Paolo Iacchetti, Luca Lombardi. In the words of the curator, the show is an opportunity to explore the complex relation among pictorial language, aniconic composition, and visual comprehension; in other words, according to Daffra, between the two poles represented by painting and perception, all the essential components of the discipline converge. Within a historical framework, the show starts off with the most traditional approaches to language and reaches the most recent and innovative experimentation, confirming the role of painting as a privileged medium to scrutinize the process of composition of the shapes on the surface of the “canvas”. As Daffra writes, the lexical direction of each artist, used as a metaphorical element to explore the surrounding world, allows us to investigate the “classic” effects of perception, while the optical complexity of the texture opens up new paths towards a deeper understanding of the narrative levels within the works.
At the heart of the show is the work of a historical generation represented by Antonio Calderara (Abbiategrasso 1903 – Vacciago 1978). “I would like colour to lose its nature of matter to purify itself in the reality of light,” [1] the artist wrote. While, due to the uniqueness of his work, it is difficult to attribute him to a specific current, his research on abstraction is affected by the influence of Fontana’s Spatialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the analytic German and Swiss artists. Starting from the optical-perceptive figuration, from 1959 his quest leads him to abstraction, which consists in the use of light seen in time and space. Marco Casentini’s geometries find their origin in his research on De Stijl. As in Mondrian’s last years in New York, Casentini’s abstraction is influenced by rhythm. As he states, “My works emanate from urban spaces, geometries, from shapes and their architecture. When you live in a big city, you interact with its geometries”. [2] Conversely, the work of Paolo Iacchetti experiences a progressive transition from chromatic reductionism of a spatial nature to a poetics that now focuses on sign. As Matteo Galbiati writes on him, “Gesture, pigment, media, line are the ingredients for a resonant poetics stemmed by their continuous reshuffling, accumulation, subtraction, alteration.” [3] Luca Lombardi belongs to a younger generation. His research for a pictorial sign is influenced by the action of sliding his fingers across the screen: Swipe transforms this apparently trivial gesture into a meandering, materialized, and sensual pictorial sign. As the painter says, “Inside the technological world where we inhabit capable of synthesizing anything it comes in touch with, the gestural footprint of our actions is reduced to a swipe.” However, the titles of his works recall a narrative that aims to anchor his work to randomness.
[1] From Autobiografia by Antonio Calderara, downloadable from the website
https://www.fondazionecalderara.it/it_IT/home/antonio_calderara/vita
[2] Paparoni D., Marco Casentini e l’astrazione ridefinita, in Marco Casentini. Rollercoaster, Progettoarte Elm, Milan, IT, 2013, p. 16
[3] Galbiati M., Paolo Iacchetti. Pittura, energia di elementi primari, Espoarte, Albissola Marina (SV), IT, April 1st, 2020, pp. 78-79
