China on typographic book in wooden and plexiglass box
80×55 cm
1971
NOTES: Signature, date, and label of the Studio Santandrea gallery on the back;
Authenticated by the artist on photograph. Work registered with the Emilio Isgrò Archive, archive n. 0187.
The work will be published in the artist’s catalogue raisonné.
PROVENANCE: Private collection.
Discover the video of the artwork (right-click on the link and select “open link in another browser window”) https://youtube.com/shorts/8a3HiX2DIZA?feature=share
Emilio Isgrò erasing to reveal
Emilio Isgrò erased this municipal poster in Milan in 1975, the black marks we see immediately bring to mind the censorship that the regime imposed during the twenty years of Fascism on words and phrases considered dangerous in letters sent by post. However, Isgrò’s erasure has the opposite meaning to that of censorship: not to eliminate, but to reveal. In each of his works erased during those years, some words remain legible, and the eye searches for what is left, connects it, creates new meanings, and wonders why certain words and not others.
All of Isgrò’s work refers to erasure as an act of revelation: the red stories, which cover the names of revolutionaries and their actions with a ‘politically symbolic’ field of color; the enlarged details which, by disproportionately enlarging a point in a portrait, effectively erase it but amplify its presence; the extracted vowels or notes, in which the text is reduced to a single letter. All this is done with the great irony through which Isgrò defuses any risk of ideological drift.