Giorgio Griffa - works
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Short Review
In the Arabesque, circular time and linear time are added together. In fact,the Arabesque always returns to himself and at the same time moves to another point. Giorgio Griffa -
Anonymous signs belonging to any hand carry at least thirty thousand years of memory inside them and, left undetermined, do not place preferences on the past. My personal memory fades in front of theirs. I have to forget about myself. Painting has always told us about the world through the knowledge of its time, also telling us about itself. It seemed to me, at some point, that it had become necessary in my work to bring together what the signs tell us about themselves with an external reference, in much the same way as the tradition that used here and there of the Bible, Olympus, decorations taken from mathematics, ideograms and much more. This is what gave rise to some series in my work. In the series "Three Lines with an Arabesque", each work contained three lines and an arabesque, as well as a progressive number that distinguished them from each other, where the first was number one, the second, number two, and so on. In the "Numbering" series, the numbers each time indicated the order in which the marks were placed on the canvas. In both of those series, an order was given, in which each number marks a before and after in time and space. Giorgio Griffa, from the text Griffa "All the toughts of all" of 2020
Canvas, paper are for Giorgio Griffa concrete objects, physical objects present in space and made in such a way as to respond, to their distinct and specific way, to the advent of color with its transparencies and irregularities, with its vibrations and nuances. Distinguishing, dividing these components of the same sequence, these parts of the same organism, can only take place in accordance with a mercantile and commercial perspective, completely alien to the spirit and interests of the artist. In these drawings you can breathe instead the same deep and aerial grace, the same harmonies and the same thoughts that we find on the canvases. They ask exactly the same questions and convey the same suggestions. For example: why just three lines and an Arabesque? Why not the dots, then, or the stains (which Griffa had already used by calling them, more correctly, "sponges") why not the circles or the rods, why not the "surfaces " as Kandinsky suggested? I believe that this issue is relevant because it allows us to sink deeper into the profound reasons for this work: that it escapes not only from geometries but also from any closed structure or form, because it constitutes a way of circumscribing and therefore chaining and defining space. Kandinsky, in his masterful didactic text elaborated for the Bauhaus, indicates the most elementary and simple progression towards the construction of form, while Griffa refuses to progress, as well as to build, indeed firmly renounces any closure or determination because, as he tirelessly tried to explain, he wants to look further back, to the origins of a colorful doing that before being logical is human, and before being system is intuition, it is need, it is sense. Giorgio Griffa's un-finished is not romantic but it is impossible to end, humble and poetic cognition of those small, insignificant lacerations that inevitably creep into the compact fabric of every closed and too perfect system, relaunching, as if through a window of opportunity, the idea of infinity, incomprehensible that has always been known, to which the biological death itself, if I may go so far, is certainly not denial but, if anything, silence on the one hand, prelude perhaps to new sounds, harmony of mathematical vertigo suspended between knots of stars in addition to time and Bohr quantum. In light of these beautiful cards that wind one after the other like the notes of a concert or a serenade, all similar and all different, all strictly centered around the visually and physically open dimensions of the three lines and the arabesque and the symbolically equally open dimension of the series of natural numbers, we still touch with our eyes the material invention of a pictorial space irreducible to the system of "simply relations between height, width and depth", as Panofsky indicated, an unfinished but precise space, a metaphor for a vaguely sly universe that does not allow itself (more) to be harnessed in the regular continuum of a symbolic form, in the strong sense of Ernst Cassirer. This space and this painting are the special and exclusive inventions of Giorgio Griffa,the result of the unrepeatable involvement of his body, that is, of his particular way of placing his hand on paper, of choosing colors, of thinking (years ago) as a Western man attracted to the East and today, perhaps, as an artist of the post-Heidelberg era attracted by the numerical irrationality of the golden section. Artist who, while firmly supporting the prevalence of the cognitive value of art, has never disdained the small glimpses of beauty continuously wide open in front of his eyes, in the dense fabric of paper: between the rhythmic volutes of the Arabesque and the colorful adventure of the lines. Martina Corgnati, text taken "Giorgio Griffa- Tre linee con un arabesco", 2010.
All these works by Giorgio Griffa are for sale except those where the words "not available" appears
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