The Gallery Credito Valtellinese Group in Corso Magenta in Milan offers an organic tribute to Franco Grignani.
The goal of Cristina Quadrio Curzio and Leo Guerra, commissioners of the exhibitions of the Credito Valtellinese Galleries, with Manuela Grignani is to restore Grignani's complexity as an artist. He has expressed himself as an artist, architect, photographer, graphic designer, art director. And it is all these facets that the retrospective intends to give an account of, documenting different peculiarities and skills but all closely attributable to Grignani's research on visual perception, a research to which she remained faithful for her entire life.
For the general public, the figure of Grignani can be traced back to a brand, that of Pure Virgin Wool created by him in 1964, perhaps the best known and most universal in the history of communication in the second half of the last century. But that brand, lucky as it is, is only one of many created by him, the result of a specialization among the various ones of Grignani, artist and intellectual who has never missed any opportunity to deepen the perception of the image and the "rules" that they are implied, convinced that “the image reaches its dynamic unity through various levels of integration: tension, rhythm, mathematical harmony. The experiment – continues Grignani – is the result of a conflict between external and internal forces, between two dynamic forces and reference forces”.
His has always been a research on the "truth of the visual form", conducted in a solitary, methodical, refined way, at the same time very open to what, also thanks to the echo of his work, was maturing in Europe and in the world. It is applied to all of his activities and artistic creations, as the different sections of this exhibition clearly show, also through the presentation of a very large number of unpublished works.
Grignani, from Pavia on the Po, was born in Pieve di Porto Morone in the year of the official birth of Cubism, i.e. in 1908. The sinuosities, movement and refractions of the eddies of the Great River seem to fascinate him, compared to the fixed surface of the Po valley.
In Turin, where he follows Architecture, he is involved in the ferment of the second Futurism, a transition towards geometric abstractionism and constructivism. Drawing on perceptive theories and the psychology of form, he conducts experiments combining photograms, photomontages, superimpositions and elaborate graphics. With the Milanese Alfieri & Lacroix he investigates new forms of typography. He creates optical systems that affect and influence his European colleagues.
The next step sees him intervene, with rotations, deformations, torsions, accelerations, reversals, directly on the image. Always keeping an eye on and thinking about the stresses that these processes cause in the observer. He becomes the art director of “Bellezza d'Italia”, the press organ of Dompé, a pharmaceutical company that also engages him in the packaging of products, and then of “ Pubblicità in Italia”. In the meantime, he continues his investigation into the representation of the urban landscape, also resorting to “…lame lenses, glasses, condensers, prisms, water, oil…”. The goal is once again to overcome the physiological limits of the hand and eyes, to arrive at a representation that makes its own the mathematical and physical laws, already known or only intuited by him. This work, on various fronts, brought him international recognition, such as the Palme d'Or for Advertising in 1959 and the gold medal of the Milan Triennale or the Prize (1972) of the Venice Biennale.
He died in Milan in 1999, but his works continue to be exhibited and admired in museums around the world.
An extensive bilingual catalog (Italian/English) will follow the chronology of the exhibition, giving prominence to each creative phase of Grignani. From the first years of his work in 1929 until the date of his death. An important essay by Prof Giovanni Anceschi and a memoir by his friend Gillo Dorfless will accompany the critical success of the volume.
Coordinates show
Title
FRANCO GRIGNANI.
Optical-mental alterations 1929-1999
Work location:
Galleria Credito Valtellinese Group
Corso Magenta n. 59 – Milan
Duration
January 23 - March 15, 2014
Times and entrances
Galleria Credito Valtellinese Group
Monday to Friday 10.00 - 19.30
Saturday 9.00 - 14.00
closed on Sunday – FREE ADMISSION
