“I wait for a moment that I find where to sit then I tell them everything, not only of the exhibition: I have already done the paintings.” And he explains that he has back pain “but compatibly with the years I am fine”.
Giorgio Gruffa was born in Turin we can now say 89 years ago (March 29 is his birthday). And since childhood he paints. He probably doesn’t even know with precision since: it happened, it had to happen, for that dynamic, continuous, unstoppable flow of the subject who is in all his work.
We interview it for The monographic dedicated to him in Genoa, to Palazzo Ducale, until 13 July. Title: Paint the invisible. “The arts open the door to the invisible, continue to enter the unknown since the time of Orpheus. And the unknown is that part of reality that we cannot give identity. I am religious, but I prefer that the invisible remains such: it is within us and we do not even find it by going to the psychoanalyst », he explains. “I do not allow myself to give this other dimension a figure of God in my image and likeness”.
Griffa is the perfect example of how age is a limit for the body but not for the mind, which continues to travel, like the lines and colors it proposes, between multiple worlds: the most recent physics (“in our quantum universe life is everywhere”), the philosophy of becoming, literature. And only then the painting.
There was also time to become a lawyer (“by means of service”) in the study of the father, but the jurisprudence has never tied it to him, and beyond himself as painting, even if he learned there “to put a rule on every job I do, and then perhaps transgr with it. In an artist the opposites coexist. Instead as a painter I had learned to put a little more fantasy in those practices ».
On display, in eleven rooms, large canvases, works on paper and installations, including a tribute to Eugenio Montale on the centenary of the poetic collection Cuttlefish bones. To celebrate a protagonist of Niche of contemporary art and master of the abstract (although the labels are close to him), in collaboration with the Giorgio Gruffa Foundation and the care of Ilaria Bonacossa, director of Palazzo Ducale, and Sébastien Delot, a profound connoisseur of his personal style reduced to the essential: canvas, primary signs that are reality and together with his representation and pure colors. The lightness of his works is the Calvinian lightness of American lessonsit is that of the bird, not of the feather, by Paul Valery “because the feather is a slave of the wind, instead the bird exploits it, his is the choice to fly, which is then the gravity that is made ethereal of Pegaso”, reflects.
Lightness and research of the unwanted attribute to the his art one dimension other, out of time and close to Zen thought, but there is also the beauty of the Taoof the strength that flows perpetually through the energy that moves the matter of the universe, of the Vedas and that “continuous beacoming” which was also the title of one of its exhibitions and that leaves us in a continuous state of suspension. His brush strokes, the result of an apparent repetition, are renewed to every gesture of the painter, as every act of life is always new and unrepeatable. «The perfect mechanical universe of Newton, Matisse, has fallen, leaves the perspective system and represents the space by occupying it rhythmically. In my work, the sequences of signs occupy space and time, one sign after another, one sequence after the other “explains. «They are repetitive signs, fingerprints of the thumb, brush, spatula that recall the rhythm of knowledge, sowing, harvest, music, poetry. There is a rhythmic sequence that goes on the canvas: it’s a bit like walking ».
What is the task of art today? «Mine has always been that of living. I have never seen the individual opposed to the collective. We come from a tradition in which the artist somehow dominates God, he is a super man who paints. The principle of domination has reached very high levels with Dante and in our Renaissance, in painting, with Piero della Francesca. The artist, however, states himself. With the past century this principle begins to falter because the means of domination have become too powerful and are now means of mass destruction, just look at what happens with Putin and Trump. The arts abandoned this system of domination of the matter and have passed to an interview with it. There is an extraordinary intelligence of the world, which only in recent decades have we discovered, which extends to the minimum particles, is widespread everywhere. I think that the analytical aspect is not a theory but a tool for passing from the domination of matter to interaction with its intelligence “.
As an amateur artist to pupil, from ’60 to ’63, by Filippo Scroppo, abstract painter and professor at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, collaborator of Felice Casorati and member of the concrete art movement (Mac). However, only in the mid-1960s in his figurative paintings begin to appear abstract elements that will lead him to reflections on the statute of painting, on the tools of painting and on the artist’s position and in ’67 -68 to the cycle of primary signs. Associated with poor art, analytical painting or minimalism, its artistic path remains mostly lonely and not framed in a specific current. When criticism included him in the analytical line of Italian painting, a sort of reaction from the late 60s to Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art, he reiterated that he was a painter and nothing else. “The poor people have shown attention to the intelligence of the subject. There is a bit of everything in my art: it is a mixture, as has always happened in the history of humanity. The boxes often make critics not the painters, the painters paint. I have never made a choice for abstractness, like Kandinsky. The abstract-physician controversy in which I grew up, born from the article by Togliatti of ’48, I never accepted it. After the Biennale of ’64, that of Pop Art, in my work the figures began to detach themselves from painting, became one more and I had to abandon them. I needed to descend from the artist’s pedestal, of anonymous signs that belong to anyone’s hand, not the figure, symbol of the supreme artist and the academy technique ».
Certainly, he never got caught by the shape. “I always leave something not finished because life has passed on in the meantime, impermanence is part of us, our body, our emotions, our thoughts, our relationships. Heraclito claimed that we cannot wet twice in the same river. We deal with time and space because they are the coordinates in which we live, but we leave the door at least open to the awareness that perhaps there is something out of time and space, a becoming that we are unable to explain razi
