gouache on paper
cm 56,8×72,2
1965
NOTE:
Signed lower right
The work is registered at the Piero Dorazio Archive with the number 1965-005701-EF42
Discover the video of the artwork (right-click on the link and select “open link in another browser window”) https://youtube.com/shorts/fVawpHgCPDQ
“Colors sing together; they move from the surface forward and then back toward the surface, creating space, light, rhythm, movement, matter, forms, and expression, by themselves, for what they are,” writes Piero Dorazio.
For him, a boy under fascism and a young man in the free world of the postwar period, painting is a journey from darkness to light, from Italy divided by the fall of the Duce to the golden age in the United States, where he finds admirers, gallery owners, fellow painters, and work. Where progress and the future have a single meaning.
For Dorazio, color is a stimulus for the imagination, a source of energy and emotions. In his early abstract paintings, life seems to teem, it is an expanding cosmos, as in the works of his friend Pollock. Then his painting thickens, becomes a weave, in the sense of fabric but also of narrative, like a lingua franca capable of intertwining humanity.
At the height of his creative career in the mid-1960s, consecrated by exhibitions at MoMA and the Venice Biennale, the interweaving opens up, taking shape and structure. Dorazio looked to Futurism and Malevich, Mondrian, and Kandinsky, but took a unique and original path: color became the protagonist of space and form, and his passion for jazz, with its intersecting rhythms, inspired him in his intersecting and vibrating lines.
This painting is pure joy, an encounter of light and color, a kaleidoscope of shapes.
It is the painting of an era of confidence in the world that still illuminates us today.