More than twenty works, all created in a period of time ranging from 1955 to 1988, will bear witness to Dorazio's all-round and all-round experimental vocation. Dorazio was an artist who, having approached the world of painting in the early XNUMXs, went through the following five decades with a spirit sensitive to change and innovation. The result was a fertile and heterogeneous artistic path. Despite the artist's adherence to the fundamental principles of his painting – the Futurism of Balla, Boccioni, Severini and Magnelli, the Suprematism of Malevič and the Abstractionism of Kandinsky – his works have progressively been enriched by the influences deriving from the whole myriad encounters that punctuated the artist's career.
In 1947 Piero Dorazio founded the Forma 1 group with Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato. With these artists Dorazio developed an art that centered on the primacy of form in its essential compactness and therefore eliminated from his works any pretensions to conceptual or psychological symbolism.
In 1953 he moved to New York and came into contact with Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and the art critic Clement Greenberg. His compositions were enriched with new nuances and tones and the chaotic Abstractionism of de Kooning and the luminist overlays of Rothko. The broad colored backgrounds of him intensified into a forest of orthogonal fields in a lattice pattern.
In 1962 he was invited to be part of the Zero Group with whom it shares countless group exhibitions and a wide variety of publications. The closeness of Dorazio's art to kinetic optical experimentation - precisely in those years characterized by the search for new forms of expression and artistic procedures - did not actually transform into a material experimentation through the insertion of technological elements within the creative process of the work but in a continuous study of light and color in relation to the perceptive synthesis of how the work would have been seen.
Towards the end of the XNUMXs Piero Dorazio's color compositions spread over larger surfaces, often returning to the initial reflections that had animated his previous Cubist and Futurist works but, at this point, they are conceived with deliberately inexpressive flat colors, symbols of pure Geometricism, which are distinguished by a peculiar emission of an intrinsic light.
The works on display highlight the constant work of Piero Dorazio over a period of thirty years, focused on the exploration of the infinite expressive possibilities of colour. The exhibition is set up in such a way that the imperceptible depth of the dense interweaving of the lattice motifs contrasts with the purity of the surfaces defined by large colored backgrounds juxtaposed in rigid geometric shapes. The exhibition will be the confirmation of the Roman artist's ability to know how to instill the absolute value of color which, by totally eliminating the use of chiaroscuro, recovers its identity in the variation of light, becoming light itself.
An explosion of color emerges, an emanation of brilliant energy devoid of conceptualisms which, even today, is able to capture the viewer's gaze, enveloping him in a kaleidoscope of joy.
Info:
Timetables:
Monday – Friday 10.00 – 13.00 | 14.00 – 18.00 Saturday 18 September 10-18
Sunday 19 September by appointment
Gracis Gallery, Piazza Castello 16 – 20121 Milan T. 02 877807 gracis@gracis.com
Cover detail Piero Dorazio, 1965, photo / photo Vincenzo Pirozzi
