Giorgio Griffa The Intelligence of Painting

The exhibition Giorgio Griffa: Merveilles de l’inconnu (curated by Sébastien Delot and Marie-Amélie Senot) will be held from February 12nd to November 28th, 2021 at the LaM in Villeneuve-d’Ascq. Erik Verhagen returns to the painting of this Italian artist: resolutely abstract and, in some ways, minimal.

It is because of his non-abandonment of the pictorial medium in the 1960s that Giorgio Griffa (b. 1936), clearly occupies a special, not to say exceptional, place in the transalpine context in general, and in Turin in particular. Remaining faithful to this medium could indeed, at the time, have been seen as a sign of obstinacy, of anachronistic stubbornness. But it was also a sign of courage, since its renunciation, which was written into the genes of the various movements (starting with arte povera, closely linked to the city of Turin) that imposed themselves during this pivotal period, would have been as logical as it would have been in keeping with a sense of history. The choice of painting, therefore. The same choice made a few years earlier by Robert Ryman, to whom Griffa can, in many ways, be compared, since both of them, through a process of deconstruction, were able to lay bare the constituent parameters of the pictorial and, in the words of the latter, pay attention to its “basic elements”. Essentials. In order to meet this objective, the artist initially and unsurprisingly—he is also, whether we like it or not and despite his resistance, a product of his time—renounced all forms of figuration, while distancing himself from an informal and still very influential painting of which the “temperature had to be lowered” in order to bring out its