Rythme et répétition. Une esthétique contemporaine
Tornabuoni Art reaffirms its commitment to promoting Italian post-war artists through Rythme et répétition. Une esthétique contemporaine and explores this artistic period from a new angle, offering new keys to understanding post-modern and contemporary Western art.
The exhibition Rythme et répétition. Une esthétique contemporaine will feature sculptures by Pablo Atchugarry (1954) alongside great post-war Italian masters whose works can also be read through the prism of variation and repetition. These include Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968), Turi Simeti (1929 – 2021), Enrico Castellani (1930 – 2017), Dadamaino (1930 – 2004), Alberto Biasi (1937), Alighiero Boetti (1940 – 1994) and Paolo Scheggi (1940 – 1971).
Tornabuoni Art reaffirms its commitment to promoting Italian post-war artists through Rythme et répétition. Une esthétique contemporaine and explores this artistic period from a new angle, offering new keys to understanding post-modern and contemporary Western art. The importance attached to monochrome, to minimalism and to the development of an aesthetic linked to a personal technical exploration that differentiates the artist from the group in which he may evolve, are recurrent elements in the works of the Italian post-war masters. The seriality of their production, this constant reiteration of the same ‘monochrome aesthetic’ or ‘mono-tone’, can be seen as an essential part of the artistic production examined. Serialism in post-war Europe was characterised by the absence of figuration, though without the precise, industrial reproduction typical of American Minimalism. By repeating a model almost identically, the artist creates a conceptual chain in which each work responds to another, echoing the same artistic breath while at the same time carrying its own identity.
A new concept of art and the work of art emerges from the crisis of canonical painting, emptied of all psychological content, open and therefore potentially a collective heritage. Works of art that are structurally, formally and materially analogous, resulting from the abstraction of the elements of the classical work of art and characterised by their subsequent positioning in a system of temporal, logical and spatial relationships.
These works are read from the outside, from their reception process and the meaning attributed to them; it becomes a matter of the observer’s projection, aesthetic and ideological investment. The difference between works in the same series also ends up residing precisely in the experience of the individual in contact with the work, a perceptual experience that is amplified by the repeated encounter and that makes the work always present, and therefore timeless.
