Bernard Piffaretti Ridgeline
Kate Macgarry, London 4 March – 9 April
For Bernard Piffaretti, bisection is key to creating the repetition and continuity central to the visual and theoretical makeup of his paintings. This show presents a collection of works created during the mid-1990s and in 2021 that feature brightly coloured painterly abstractions ranging from simple patterns with lines, dots and basic shapes like triangles and circles to more irregular forms suggesting an automatist approach. They have all been created through the artist’s ‘Piffaretti system’, which he has been honing since the 1980s: he halves his canvas with a vertical line; then creates an abstract composition on one side; and finishes by replicating it on the other, as if marking both sides with the same stamp. This duplication is inexact; we are expected to perceive the idiosyncrasies of the twin compositions – a fainter brushstroke on the right, a more rounded line on the left. The resulting works, simultaneously divided and whole, question the presence of originality and referencing in painting, while suggesting some things cannot be copied or repeated.
We can consider the works not only as imperfect mirrors of each other, but as two steps in a larger motion. If we assume movement along a historical or chronological trajectory, then it is understandable that we perceive only slight differences between the two sides of the canvas, as we would between one second and the next. This calls into question what came before, or rather what inspired the first side of the canvas Piffaretti painted, and then what preceded it, and so on. Eventually this line of questioning leads the viewer to interrogate the presence of originality in the medium of painting itself. The philosopher Parmenides famously argued that nothing comes from nothing, but the obverse of this statement
– something comes from something – seems to speak more to Piffaretti’s practice.
For an artist working in the same way for decades, risking being perceived as monotonous by his viewers, testing the possibility of ex nihilo originality while drawing out its contradictions may be the point. The two sides of his canvas speak to the inescapability of making reference, whether it be to oneself, another artist or an external event. However, Piffaretti’s initial freehand line, which parts his canvas, highlights the primary unit of all painting: a unique gesture in a specific moment in time. In creating paintings in a systematic way, almost as if he were trying to eliminate the medium’s fundamental component, he shows the impossibility of this task. Instead, he underscores the creative impulse that both links and differentiates all painting.
Salena Barry