Colors #3 - "Color’s geometries"

Studio Morri Rossetti presents the exhibition Color’s Geometry, which brings together about thirty works by three Italian artists already widely known in the contemporary art system: Marco Casentini, Roberto Floreani and Nicola Felice Torcoli.   

 

The exhibition is part of the "Colours" cycle, launched in autumn 2016, dedicated to the vitality of colour through the vision of contemporary Italian and foreign artists. An ideal follow-up to the exhibitions curated in the same law firm in the past by Silvia Fabbri, classicist and expert in contemporary art who died in 2016, the Colours cycle, curated by her daughter, Dafne Riva, aims to be a proof ofthe opening to contemporary art from part of the world of professions.

This time, the theme of the exhibition are indeed the Colour’s Geometries, intended as experiments on the formal and compositional value of colour, regardless of the representation of reality, even without completely distancing from it. Those presented by the three artists are in fact works related to the sphere of geometric abstractionism, in which, however - even in the different and original formal declensions provided to him by every artist - the images of reality seem to remain as a distant mnemonic heritage.

In Marco Casentini’s works (La Spezia 1961) the trace of the urban landscape is always latent, although the paintings are composed only of rigorously coloured blocks rigidly scanned according to a design which recalls the musical score, sometimes alterned by small rectangles of colouredplexiglass, as to provide elements of light and brightness to the composition. At times, as in the recent exhibition at the Royal Palace of Caserta, the artist expands its coloured modules beyond the canvas, reaching the walls and floors of the entire exhibition space, according to a dynamic-coloristic perspective that seems to refer to an idea of “universal work of art” that has its references in the lesson of historical avant-gardes, in a “futuristic/cubist/ geometric vision of architectural reality”, as the artist himself defined it. That of Casentini is a kind of stylization of the urban landscape brought to its extreme synthesis, as if the skeleton of urban architecture had remained only a rigid succession of lines, curves and geometries of colours that summarize the deeper meaning. 

 

More explicit in his reference to the landscape, especially urban landscape, while remaining in a substantially aniconic context, is the work of the Lombard painter Nicola Felice Torcoli (Brescia 1980).

Torcoli’s pictorial practice is completely original: the artist in fact paints simultaneously on different canvases, then he cuts each one into strips and then he reassembles them in new works, thus breaking the rules of the traditional representation of the landscape, and creating new and original images from the compositional point of view, almost completely detached from the classical concept of representativeness.

 

The painting style of Torcoli refers to the mnemonic processes and the stream of information and fragmented then recomposed images, a classic of the digital era. In spite of this, its roots can be traced back to the concepts of simultaneity and defragmentation which originate in the art of the early twentieth century. “The act of destruction and the resulting recreation is typical of the matter, it’s the groundwork of wars. The idea of conflict is a leitmotif of human relationships and from which the need of a balance is originated” said the artist.

The work of Roberto Floreani (Venice 1956) originates from aniconic basis even though sometimes memories arise – as in the project dedicated to the Great War, which was exhibited in Vicenza back in 2015. Memory is portrayed in a ready made form or in the form of items, fragments or symbols from real life, as in play of references to our personal and collective memory, as they can’t accept to stay out of the painting, even though they appear as a vague form of invitation.

Anyway the originality and power of Floreani’s artwork lies mainly in a complex procedure made of several/different layers of color and matter. Concentric or geometrical elements are constantly repeated and allude to the idea of absolute, cosmic order and rationality, still sticking to matter and time through  the repeated and continued layering of pigments, materials, castings and glazing which give the impression of being strictly connected to experience and humanity.

The strong linearity and geometrization of the painting structure balance the abundance of layers and materials used lead the user to raise questions about the meaning and the pervasiveness of our tactile and visual memory, on the passing of time and its capability of layering, mingling and constantly renovating itself. The artwork shows a constant balance on two sides, one between a fiercely mental and geometrical dimension, the other tactile, in a play of references and suggestions in which one aspect never do take precedence on the other, on the contrary the harmony prevails between the two aspects, despite their apparent diversity.