21 July – 18 August 2024
Carpet
Every colour expands,
nestles in other colours
To be more alone if you look at it
Giuseppe Ungaretti (L’Allegria, 1914-1919)
Studio Casoli presents an exhibition of Piero Dorazio, considered one of the leading representatives of European abstractionism of the late twentieth century.
The artist’s continuous evolution is delineated by the autonomous strength of colour, space, and light. Colour becomes the primary compositional element of his pictorial research. Dorazio states: “I believe we cannot, either visually or conceptually, understand the connection between man and space without the help of colour, and this can only be achieved through painting. […] The creative painter, on the other hand, is able to produce completely new phenomena that are realistic substitutes for what is found in the less evident parts of nature, such as silence, fury, integrity, calm, joy, or light. Colour, therefore, makes it possible to bring out images of space that are more related to our immediate ways of perceiving and detecting our position in space; to make our senses perceive a possibility of guessing who we are and in which space we find ourselves. […] Through colour, we can present a sense of space that might be in itself a living reality, in which others are able to understand that life is development and that progress always takes on a new image.” (Extract from the catalogue of the exhibition “Komplexe Farbe”, Galerie Roepcke, Wiesbaden, 1962)
In his paintings, references to historical avant-gardes constantly reappear, starting with Futurism, to which Dorazio has always paid homage. The artist met Balla in 1950 while walking in the gardens of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome and began to visit the “Futurist house” on Via Oslavia. In a text from 1977, Dorazio declares that he learned from Balla that images do not exist without considering the light that permeates them and makes them pulse together with everything that surrounds them.
This exhibition features paintings made in the early 1960s, which the artist himself called trame (known to us as reticoli). These are followed by large canvases from the 1970s, characterized by their expansive dimensions. Bands of colour expand into space according to ever-changing geometries. It is a renewal of shapes of colour as a material.
In 1985, during a conversation with Adachiara Zevi, Piero Dorazio stated: “The structure that others call a reticolo is actually a superimposition of parameters. The vertical, the force of gravity; the horizontal, the line of the horizon; and the diagonal, indicative of our route. These are the three directions of our existence.”
Piero Dorazio was born in Rome in 1927. In 1947, he developed the Manifesto Formalism-Forma 1 and won a scholarship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Severini, Braque, Arp, Delaunay, Le Corbusier, and other important artists of the time. In 1950, he organized the cooperative gallery of the Age d’Or group in Rome and Florence. In 1953, he traveled to the United States, where he met Motherwell, Rothko, Kiesler, and Kline, and held his first solo exhibitions in New York. He continued to travel and in 1957 presented his first solo exhibition in Rome at the Galleria La Tartaruga. In the 1960s, he taught at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently held various academic positions in the United States. In 1974, he moved to Todi, where he would spend the last thirty years of his life.
Numerous retrospectives have been dedicated to him in Italy and abroad, including those at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. His presence was constant in major international exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale, where he exhibited in 1960, 1966, and 1988. His works are included in major museums including Tate in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the MUMOK in Vienna.
