Artist: Carlo Ciussi

A arte Invernizzi gallery presents the solo show Carlo Ciussi. Una danza di tracce e colori, curated by Lorenzo Madaro, featuring works created between 1983 and 1990. The exhibition confirms the attention paid to an artist who was fundamental for research in the history of Italian art in the second half of the 20th century, to whom A arte Invernizzi has dedicated numerous projects, including solo exhibitions in its own spaces and in museum institutions - such as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice - and choral exhibitions, as well as some editorial projects.

The focus is on a specific phase of Ciussi’s work (Udine, 1930 - 2012) with around twenty medium and large format canvases and works on paper from the same phase of his pictorial investigation. In these paintings, the artist sets aside the systematic nature of a geometric abstraction and modularity that he has been verifying with untiring commitment since the 1960s and then moves on to more open and nonchalant outcomes, which are precisely those collected in the exhibition, in which sinuous, open forms and signs emerge from the rectangular and oval canvases with a thick grain, which over the years, in the canvases around 1990, intertwine with each other in a dance of traces and colours that can change from time to time.

The exhibitions - in particular the anthological at Casa Cavazzini dei Civici Musei di Udine in 2011, dedicated to the complexity of his journey into the inner bowels of painting (although Ciussi’s investigation also involved sculpture and interventions in dialogue with architecture, among other things, with very happy results) - revealed how the later years of his work coincide with a new phase in which sensuality and control coexist, as Gillo Dorfles had already pointed out in an essay dedicated precisely to this cycle in which, as was often the case with the master’s works, the titles were nothing more than Roman numerals in orderly succession.

A choice, this, that clearly has an intrinsic meaning, because it highlights on the one hand the absolute absence of any specific reference of his painting in the tangible reason for things and on the other hand the constant and undaunted search indicated precisely by the succession of a numerical order that is only apparently aseptic. The well-demarcated stripes from time to time lose their geometric and fluid consistency to become pure sign, able to spread out in space to coincide with the voluptuousness of the brushstroke: thus putting aside the geometries of his early works and the entire discourse he pursued in the 1970s around a painting linked to the perception of forms, these works by Ciussi confirm how his entire investigation is an obsessive, vigilant and cultured experience of constant metamorphosis of a well-chosen and nomadic sign.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue with a text by Lorenzo Madaro, professor of Contemporary Art History at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. The catalogue will also include reproductions of the artworks on display and an updated bio-bibliographic section.