Giorgio Griffa
Galleria Lorcan O’neill, Rome 22 February – 22 April
Giorgio Griffa’s paintings are instantly recognisable: lyrical compositions in distinctive pastel colours brushed onto raw unstretched canvas. They’re painting pared down to basics – lines, arabesques, numbers, letters – revealing how even the simplest of forms can achieve complexity and beauty. Griffa started out in 1960s Turin, a city teeming with avant-gardists including Alighiero Boetti and Giuseppe Penone. Despite these affinities and friendships, though, he has – as this show of works from the 1970s to the present affirms – eluded categorisation, forging a path of his own that he has stuck to since 1968, when he started working directly on unstretched canvases, favouring acrylics over oils.
So watery they need to be applied to the canvas laid down on the ground, Griffa’s colours – reminiscent of fifteenth-century frescoes, which he studied – are almost iridescent. (‘Oil paint has its own internal light,’ the artist said in a 2018 interview, ‘but water-based paint reflects the light and changes as the light changes.’) Each work is pinned to the wall with nails and, once a show is finished, folded and stored; the folds invariably become part of the painting, their delicate grid lines giving dimensionality to the works, as well as portability and temporality – the painting thus suggests a life of its own beyond these gallery walls. In the large Tre linee con arabesco n. 33 (1991), three unruled cerulean blue lines cross the canvas horizontally, stopping short of the border. Below and above, purple and turquoise arabesques trail off playfully, resembling a child’s pre-cursive exercise books, interrupted midsentence. Bordering the purple arabesque, pink brushstrokes appear to fall thick and heavy until vanishing entirely. Time, here, is linear and circular, infinite and suspended.
Griffa often cites modernist poetry and music as inspirations, and this is most evident in paintings from the past decade. In Cumoskom (2019), one of his smaller canvases, the nonsensical word is repeated as though an incantation, elegant capital letters grouped together around horizontal shapes and marks, colours shimmering. From a distance it could easily be mistaken for a musical score complete with breves, barlines and quarter notes. Such canvases offer cues for deep reflection: they’re at once playful and meditative, minimalist and intricate. Endlessly, on this evidence, experimenting with the language of painting and the limits of knowledge. Ana Vukadin