Watercolour on paper
inch 9.84 x 12.60 / cm 25×32
1995
EXHIBITIONS:
2003, Milan, Giorgio Griffa, Studio Guastalla Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, ill. in cat.
Discover the video of the artwork (right-click on the link and select “open link in another browser window”) https://youtube.com/shorts/6zsVuBj0N3s?feature=share
Painting and memory
If we ask about the meaning of Giorgio Griffa’s lines, we must think of them as a musical score rather than a representation, in which the signs follow one another in the time of a musical performance.
“I don’t represent anything, I paint.” With this sentence, Griffa explained more than fifty years ago the meaning of his work as a painter, who had just abandoned the figure but had chosen neither abstraction nor the informal. Griffa instead abandons his hand to the millennial memory of painting, taking a step back: no longer the deus ex machina of the work, nor the shaman who enters it as in action painting. Instead, he lets the marks chase each other across the canvas, narrating their becoming. He is certainly a child of abstraction and informal art, because his marks do not cross the threshold of figuration, but the hierarchy between the artist and the painting at his service disappears. The relationship becomes equal: it is the painter’s hand at the service of painting. Becoming is condensed on the canvas also through the random gestures of those who fold it, leaving marks that sediment time. Painting becomes the place of the spaces of memory.