September 15 – November 23 2021
PIERO DORAZIO
OLTRE LA FORMA
PIERO DORAZIO
OLTRE LA FORMA
September 15 – November 23 2021
“We wanted to create art that would be able to become a kind of decoration, a non-intellectual accessible art, a new art based upon form since its content is implicit of the form and, thus, an attractive art that will attract people and pleasure”
The Galleria Gracis will be inaugurating its Autumn season in the name of pleasure with a selection of Abstract works by Piero Dorazio (Rome, 29th June 1927 – Perugia, 17th May 2005) that will be gracing the rooms of Piazza Castello, 16 in Milan with creations of light and colour from the 15th September until the 23rd November.
More than twenty works, all realised in a period running from 1955 to 1988, will bear witness to Dorazio’s all-around and all-encompassing experimental vocation. Dorazio was an artist who, having approached the world of painting at the beginning of the 1940’s, moved through the following five decades with a spirit which was sensitive to change and innovation. The result was an artistic journey that was both fertile and heterogeneous. Despite the artist’s adherence to the fundamental principles of his painting – the Futurism of Balla, Boccioni, Severini and Magnelli, the Suprematism of Malevič and the Abstractionism of Kandinskij – his works were gradually enriched by the influxes that were derived from the whole host of encounters that studded the artist’s career.
In 1947, Piero Dorazio founded the Forma 1 group with Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato. With these artists Dorazio developed an art that was centred upon the pre-eminence of form in its essential compactness and he therefore eliminated from his works all pretence of conceptual or psychological Symbolism.
In 1953, he moved to New York and came into contact with Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and the art critic Clement Greenberg. His compositions became enriched by new shades and tones and by the chaotic Abstractionism of de Kooning and the Luminist superimpositions of Rothko. His broad coloured backgrounds intensified into a forest of orthogonal fields in a lattice motif.
In 1962, he was invited to become a part of the Gruppo Zero with which he shared countless collective exhibitions and a wide variety of publications. The nearness of Dorazio’s art to kinetic optical experimentation – in those very years characterised by the quest for new expressive forms and artistic procedures – was not actually transformed into a material experimentation by means of the insertion of technological elements within the creative process of the work but in a continual study of light and of colour in relation to the perceptive synthesis of how the work would be viewed.
Towards the end of the 1960’s, Piero Dorazio’s colouristic compositions were spread over larger surfaces, often returning to the initial reflections which had informed his earlier Cubist and Futurist works but, at this point in time, they were devised with flat colours that were deliberately inexpressive, symbols of pure Geometricism, standing out on account of a peculiar emission of an inherent light.
The works in the exhibition highlight the constant work undertaken by Piero Dorazio over a period of thirty years – work that was centred upon an expoloration of the infinite expressive possibilities of colour. The exhibition is set out in such a way that the imperceptible depth of the dense twists and turns of the lattice motifs is contrasted with the purity of surfaces defined by broad colour-filled backgrounds brought together in rigid geometrical shapes. The exhibition will be the confirmation of the skill of the Roman artist in being able to instil the absolute value of colour which, by totally resetting the use of chiaroscuro, retrieves an identity in the variation of light by becoming light itself.
An explosion of colour emerges, an emanation of brilliant energy deprived of conceptualisms which, to this very day, is able to capture the spectator’s eye, enveloping him or her inside a kaleidoscope of joy.