We are pleased to host an exhibition by the painter Giorgio Griffa in the Salone of Villa Romana . Griffa conceived the selection of works, from the last two years of his work, as a reflection on the relationship between individual and collective, among the thoughts that the 90 billion neurons generate in every single individual of the eight billion human beings currently living on this planet and those thought by the 100 billion human beings who lived before us. If it is true that the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant, then it constantly circulates between a state of indistinguishability on the one hand and a state of individual identity on the other. Griffa believes that painting is the search for fragments of this immense collective memory.

Giorgio Griffa was born in Turin in 1936 and still resides here. Since the end of the 1960s he has practiced painting as a kind of punctuation, as an act that brings color to the fore. The rhythm of the signs on the canvas is inspired by the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of a way of writing before the advent of writing itself. Its chromatism is imbued with light; every single color appears as an intermediate shade. At the beginning of his career, in the 1960s, after seeing the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, he switched from oil to acrylic painting, capable of reflecting the light of the world more freely.

As in watercolor painting, Griffa applies the color in clear and unique marks on an unstretched canvas. When the painting is temporarily not visible (in collections or exhibitions), the canvas is folded and put away. The folds remain visible as traces of this intermediate state.

Giorgio Griffa 's painting has been ascribed to the Informal, Arte Povera, analytical and even conceptual painting, but it is absolutely unique in its openness, in its approach as sensitive as it is decisive and in its non-hierarchical materiality. It stands as a form of painting that always returns to the origins of painting: the hand, the color, the support, the light. they have been exhibited all over the world in more than 150 solo and many group exhibitions. However, this is the first time in 45 years - since his 1977 exhibition at the Galleria La Piramide - that his painting is exhibited again in Florence.

Courtesy Giorgio Griffa Archive

Photos: Ela Bialkowska / OKNOstudio