The exhibition, entitled Materia. Fragment. Ombra, curated by Olga Sviblova, director of MAMM, and Francesca Pini, makes use of the artistic direction of the project by Piero Mascitti and is promoted by the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow, in collaboration with the Pino Pinelli Archive and the Claudio Poleschi galleries Arte di Lucca and Dep Art of Milan, and presents nine key works of the Sicilian artist's research, particularly representative of his expressive style.
"The review - observes Olga Strada, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow - inaugurates the season of exhibitions that the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow intends to organize to tell the Moscow public about the years of fervent artistic experimentation that arose in Italy after the war ”.
The Seventies in Italy witnessed the birth of a real stylistic revolution. The artists perceived the limit of the picture, understood as a set of canvas and frame: the surfaces thus saw the appearance of extrusions, as in the case of Bonalumi and Castellani; of cuts, as in Lucio Fontana.
For his part, Pino Pinelli, who was born a painter using the classic means of the trade, breathed the cultural climate of that period and arrived at the "dissemination" - to use a term proper to Pinelli's art - that is, fragmenting the painting object into the elements that compose it (canvas and frame) and involving in this process the element extraneous to the painting itself: the wall which, losing its condition of neutrality, becomes its co-protagonist capable of welcoming elements of pure color, declined in shapes now frowning, now clotted, now linear and dry, now fractal and free, generally gathered in a slightly arched path, as if to imitate the gesture of the sower.
The exhibition is accompanied by a trilingual catalog (Italian, English, Russian) Silvana editorial, with texts by the curators, by Marco Meneguzzo and a critical anthology from the 70s to the present day.
Pino Pinelli. Biographical notes
Pino Pinelli was born in Catania in 1938, where he completed his artistic studies. In 1963 he moved to Milan, where he still lives and works, fascinated and attracted by the artistic debate of those years, animated by figures such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani. He participates in the San Fedele prizes and in 1968 he holds his first personal exhibition at the Bergamini Gallery. In the early 70s Pinelli began a phase of reflection and research, in which he attempted to focus on the essential link between tradition and innovation, with particular attention to the pictorial surface, to the vibrations of the paint. This is how the cycles of the "Topologies" and those of the "Monochromes" are born, the surface of which begins to be moved by a subtle restlessness, almost as if the artist wanted to restore the very breath of painting. These experiences place him in the trend that Filiberto Menna defined as "analytical painting", even if from 1976 Pinelli drastically reduces the size of his works, which are placed in space, juxtaposed one to the other, almost as if an explosion had hit his large canvases and had generated a dissemination of their fragments in space: the artist abandons canvas and frame, attracted by the very concept of painting.
Breaking the concept of painting into fragments is the "desperate" act of the European painter who feels the weight of history, feels crushed by this essential enormity which is the awareness of what came before: the only possible act is therefore that of "thinking" the painting rather than "doing it". Italian artists cannot have the attitude of the American artist who, day after day, has to create and carve out his own story; but for the artist who lives in the land of Piero della Francesca, of Masaccio and who feels the weight of the history of art, the only possible attitude is to "load" painting with a new meaning.
In the work the "cut rectangle" the wall becomes the protagonist as it loses its condition of neutrality creating a whole with the work, while in the works made up of several pictorial elements these multiply and migrate following a pre-established path, slightly arched , as if to mimic the gesture of the sower, thus giving rise to dissemination.
Beyond the labels of "analytical painting", Pinelli's works are restless bodies of painting traveling in space, fluctuating and migrating in small or large formations, made of materials that bear the imprinted signs of anxious ductility, and which they enhance the tactile physicality and visual happiness of a pulsating color of luminous vibrations.
