Auroque.zine: Almost Everything for Giorgio Griffa

Oblíque, 1976. Tinta acrílica obre tela.

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art is exhibiting an anthology of drawings and paintings from Giorgio Griffa. Presented by the first time in Portugal the exhibition shows this artist’s work that spans from 1969 to 2015.
His work inscribes itself in the group of works whose authors had sought the elemental nature of things and in doing so they’ve based their artistic practice in the utopias of a reencounter with a lost innocence. For Giorgio Griffa, the process of disassembling painting is a method for knowledge deepening. He disassembles painting in its essential components until he reaches the lower substrates, arriving to the point of intercrossing the elements of painting with the elements of drawing. In a way this methodology can be enclosed in the 1960’s avant-gardist wish (the time by which Griffa began his work) of redefining the artistic disciplines and practices. Nevertheless, Giorgio Griffa avoids this and other streams of that time (like arte povera with which he was greatly connoted) not being classified into none but drinking from all of it.
With assumed gestural or performative emphasis, Griffa applies the colors in a brute fashion onto the unprepared and unframed canvas which is the equally exposed without frame nor physical framing. The dimensions of the paintings (draperies…) vary, only assuming ensemble configurations to ease any interpretation (e. g., a drapery that has been painted and cut into sections, to be exposed side by side in order to suggest some sort of continuity). The applied acrylic colors, watercoloured, gain more joy as his work evolves over the decades. They began by being applied like monosyllables over the raw cloth, as if it was to teach some very own alphabet, in which the colors indicate the tone. The magentas, the blues and the reds appear, somewhat fainted by their origins as well as by the time. Later on, by his latest works, the forms become more complex and the vivid yellows, the vivid reds, the oranges and the purples appear. Nevertheless, what stands out in Griffa’s work it’s in fact the gesture with which the colors are applied. There can be seen obliques (traces), coarse but uniform dots, arabesques and, later on, numbers and letters. Most of the canvases are filled predominantly by left, as it was started there and then evolving towards right. It’s like it was a unconscious faint allusion to the signs of writing. Reinforcing this allusion it can be observed that in many cases, in the progression of the pictorial matter from left to right, the canvas far part of the right or the lower part of this one is left blank. Beyond reinforcing the writing practice reminiscence this way of making the pictorial matter prograde on the canvas is as if it indicates the limited character of the human cognition and search for knowledge: it an ever incomplete quest. It’s also the formal response of the artist to a wish of immediacy and an interest on the performative dimension of painting, both inspired by zen philosophy.
What stands out in Griffa’s work it’s the similarity of his paintings with drawing practice in its condition of thought support. Moreover, at the exhibition, there are also drawings in paper that are like a transition link between the idea and the painting instead of constituting sketches in the strict sense . In the drawings, ideas and notions are introduced to be after explored in the larger format paintings. Paintings therefore continue the work that begun with drawing instead of settling on it, which in a way contributes to the decomposition in painting elements that converge in decomposition of drawing elements. Besides, drawings are what he calls the “intimate laboratory” where he researches the memory primordial depot that are the signs .
In an interview for the Contemporary Art Museum of Serralves, Griffa admits that his work it’s more a thinking development before it’s formal one. “I don’t portrait anything, I paint” are the words of Giorgio Griffa himself. For him painting is a problem of substance, of background knowledge . And to confirm it are his works on the golden ratio, that in a way has this je ne sais quoi of naive (Griffa is an artist, not a scientist…). Yet, the decomposition in the elements of painting doesn’t only serve the search for a background knowledge. It is, according the artist, a process of deep and collective knowledge. His method seeks the memory of painting immanent in the signs of 30 or 40 thousand years ago and that is present in the memory of everyone. “The intelligence of matter” is an expression used by Griffa to introduce the notion that even himself is part of a global condition of artistic production. He creates the work of art not because of his will but in the following of a dialogue with the substrate of the work, being it the painting canvas, the drawing paper or the sculpture stone.
In order not get astray from his route in his search development, Giorgio Griffa helps himself with some references: his early 80’s cycle of works entitled “Alter Ego” it’s a mix of dedications, homages and thefts of works from Matisse, Klein, Beuys, Klee, Tintoretto, Paolo Uccello, Piero d’Orazio, Anselmo and Agnes Martin . Griffa struggles with the “formal cage” (another of his expressions) which by its counterpart and paradoxically gives him a great freedom to deepen his search for knowledge, as if it was “a second youth”.
The drawing-painting bipolarity in the work of Giorgio Griffa fades way as his work evolves. His considerations about distancing from the “formal cage” lead him towards one of the drawing practice fundamentals: the reencounter between thought, gesture and observation. What makes this artist’s work so interesting is precisely this condition of seek, of research, transposed to an artistic practice that has no ambition of having a substance other than form. Griffa tries to show that it’s also up to painting a dimension of search for knowledge. He calls upon painting properties that – more by tradition than by concept, one must say – are conditioned to drawing practice.

The showing will be on until 4 September 2016. More information at Serralves.