On Friday, Sept. 2 at 6 p.m. at ARTinGENIO MUSEUM, under the patronage of the Municipality of Pisa, the inauguration of the solo exhibition of Massimo Garrone, aka MAGA, "From Informal to Abstract" will take place.
A vernissage is scheduled at which the director of the Museum Francesco Corsi and the Culture Councillor of the Municipality of Pisa Pierpaolo Magnani will speak.
EXHIBITION PERIOD: Sept. 2 to 16, 2022
OPENING HOURS: Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
CONTACTS: ARTinGENIO MUSEUM- OFFICINE GARIBALDI Via Vincenzo Gioberti, n. 39- 56124- Pisa (PI)
FOR GUIDED TOURS CONTACT +39 335- 7789135 info@artingenioedizioni.it
Gillo Dorfles (1910-2018), assigned the label of "Informal" to those forms of abstractionism on the one hand completely alien to figuration, on the other hand devoid of semantic intention. Forms of art, devoid of form, born from the negation of any schematism. Yet the so-called "informal" unites a variety of expressive forms of the twentieth century that were born in the bosom of the Dada movement, expressionism, surrealism. Surely the matrix of these deflagrating tensions lies in the provocation and irony that mocks the rational apparatus. Some air of freedom to overcome the conceptual cages of regimes. Against all subjugation of art, against all finalization, ethical and even social function, as it was for Guttuso, the informal ends artistic action with the gesture of creation. Art is pure gesture inseparable from the employment of the materials used, which become the protagonists of the work of art, often beyond the artist himself, when the intention becomes to make the object speak with its rippled, rough, rusty surface, without any spiritualism. This is the case with arte povera, to which our Garrone partly refers. The simplicity of corks or bottle seals, reclaimed materials, exemplifies this.
If it is true that informal art arose in some way in the bosom of abstract art, which followed from the impressionism interpreted by Cezanne, then we can see in it that similarity that is evident in the production of MAGA, that is, Massimo Garrone. We are in front of an artist who, belonging to the climate of protest in the 1970s, loves to play with color, with materials, loves to experiment, to create extemporaneously, but always with a focus on history, culture and form. If he moves his steps from the informal inspiration of Fontana's and Burri's world, he elaborates an interesting abstractionism in which we can trace sign kinships with Bridget Riley, Hans Hartung, but even Piet Mondrian, for his colors and sense of geometrism, and Jean Dubuffet progenitor of Art Brut. Some works seem to evoke the compositions of Alberto Magnelli, geometric and soft at the same time, crossed by straight lines that seem to forcefully claim the geometric instance in the amalgamation of color. In Garrone there is the restlessness of research, of experimentation with styles that not only draw on his vast artistic culture, but also on a deep descent into the bosom of archetypes. In one of the last works, in which we see metaphysical human figures that remind us of De Chirico's faces, we find the abstract signs that draw on the archetype of the forest, of trees, which become that forest of spears that make us think of Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano. And among animals, horses, horsemen, we cannot help but catch echoes of surrealist painting. An artist who ranges in search of an expression that, while subsuming many high lessons of art history, is unquestionably his own, because it arises spontaneously from his being a man of improvisational making. Beyond the scheme of theory, for Garrone there is the practice of life, the giving being to objects destined for the dustbin, such as corks or bottle seals. A taste for recovery, for the salvation of the things of the world, animated by a great sensitivity in dialogue with a vein of transgression and madness. Informalism, which violates form, thus dialogues in a relaxed way with love for the figure, without any moralistic or didactic need, but simply ironic and creative, a bit like the child who evoked the great Nietzsche.
