Riccardo Guarneri - The papers

Date : 17 Oct 2020 22 Nov 2020

Artists : Riccardo Guarneri

Curator : Erminia Colossi

Short Review

At the foundations of the exhibition"RICCARDO GUARNERI - Le Carte" lies an absolute and shareable certainty although, at the moment, it still needs to be clarified: Riccardo Guarneri is not an analytical artist; and, as lacking this indispensable intellectual premise, he and his works cannot belong entirely to the same current. If anything, the opposite is true. This is a fact not to be forgotten and, above all, not to be underestimated: since already at the dawn of the current called Analytical Painting (between 1971 and 1973) its exponents debate whether or not to count it among their own, although Guarneri already has behind him a decade of well-recognized individual research with inevitable visual similarities. Since 1962, in fact, he has been working tirelessly, consciously, grasping the meaning of painting and crossing on his path those results that will then be specific to future companions, each certainly with his own language identifier. Riccardo,however, from the first moments, is recognized as unique, singular, primigenie - even in the pictorial sense of the term - true matrices of his poetic research. And that's also a fact. Gianfranco Zappettini actually, first bishop of the analytical group, he questions himself together with the intellectual founder of the movement Filiberto Menna on this topic: yet in the immediate following, without much attention to clichés and labels but focusing decisively on the human and intellectual relationships that Riccardo has been cultivating for some time, he actively participates in national artistic life by establishing new ties with his friend of a lifetime Paolo Masi but also with zappettini, Olivieri, Verna, Raciti,Vago; and with the exponents of the other movements that divide the scene between the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century: the Genoese companions of TEMPO3 under the guidance of Eugenio Battisti (Bargoni, Carreri, Esposto, Stirone); Lucius Fontana and the Spacers; the boys of Azimut and his Milanese friends (La Pietra, Ferrari, Verga, Sordini, Vermi; but also Restany and his "new realists"); The Group1 of Rome (among many, Carrino, Biggi, Frascà, Pace and Uncini); Umberto Apollonio (Director of the Archive of the Venice Biennale), my dear friend Lara Vinca Masini di Numero and many, many others on the international scene. Riccardo navigates on sight between Concrete Art and Programmed Art, Arte Povera and Visual Poetry, proceeding protected by his research that listens and reflects his own pictorial sensations. Much more than just an artistic season, he experiences an era of great ideal revolutions and style, sincere sharing and intellectual battles in which tangible manifestations of research and a fortifying corporate affiliation support each other. The doubts of belonging, then then surprised but today still completely current and noteworthy, they are very clear, if only for that enormous emotional and pragmatic diversity at the same time that immediately appears as an exception to confirm the rule: the solutions obtained by Guarneri have little to do with that cold breakdown of painting, regulated by arithmetical formulas and algorithms and by an analysis at the limit of the scientific of the capital elements of the same that is then typical of many of the artistic fringes prevailing especially in Italy. Rather, in the increasingly intimate and solitary investigation of color to arrive at a minimum tonal phoneme from which to start again, he considers its basic elements such as the musical rhythm of the forms, the balanced color juxtaposition, an obvious pictorial lyricism that derives from the observation of the Northern atmospheres before, Florentine humanities after - and that Guarneri tends to sublimate according to a very personal character inclination for which, precisely the shapes and geometries, are nothing more than the result of scraps, syncopated times, flashes of light recorded by sudden notes followed by a "slow consumption time", measured and then assimilated. At the end of it all - of course - is painting. Totally intimidating, his vision immediately strides with the founding principles of the analytical current, accepts them but can never be fully accepted: for this reason, it is unacceptable to consider it as such. RICCARDO GUARNERI - Le Carte is, therefore, an exhibition on the pictorial suspension achieved by the Florentine artist and on his absolute uniqueness of path. All the works, strictly on paper and made ad hoc for the exhibition, have in them the complexity of a research that starts from afar, from that first test in this regard (his canvas N.1 - A handwriting that becomes an object, 1962) to reach us through second thoughts and changes, analyses and conceptual thrusts no less worthy of the results obtained at the same time on supports for many much nobler. This is nonsense: for Guarneri himself, in fact, this collection represents a declaration of intent and a boast because from memory we do not remember exhibitions that have considered only the cards to tell the path; and, specifically, it clarifies once again the difficulties and authority that underlie the precipice choice of a material, voluntarily selected by the artist for its intrinsic qualities: weight (600 mg), grain, porosity, that solid and heterogeneous surface that is challenge and pleasure at the same time - for him, since he has memory. An appendix to the exhibition are some selected pieces from Giovanna Uzzani's fundamental study "Riccardo Guarneri - CONTRAPPUNToLUCE" (published on the occasion of the exhibition itself, held from 23 October to 20 December 2004 in Florence, at the Gallery of Modern Art of Palazzo Pitti, Salone del Fiorino, Sala della Musica): masterfully recorded by the scholar in a continuous and healthy debate between reasoned historical interventions and biographical stories, the extracts simplify the painting of Riccardo Guarneri through his eyes and his words, thoughts and memories, with an adherence and sincerity difficult to reach from any other critical intervention.