HOMMAGE TO MARCOLINO GANDINI
From 10 October 2024 to 12 January 2025
Venice, Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art
Project curated by Elisabetta Barisoni
Thanks to Augusto Gandini, Chiara Fabbri
Gandini plays a tough game, with his cards open. He inserts perspective hypotheses into curved spaces, into real horizons: the line becomes margin, furrow and even volume; the color becomes filled with concrete […] Geometry, a spatial hypothesis, becomes real space, built with colored beams as if they were concrete structures. The painter makes forms like a sculptor; the painter and the sculptor create spaces like the architect.
[Giulio Carlo Argan on the occasion of the Parabola 66 exhibition at the Il Bilico gallery, Rome]
Ca’ Pesaro’s hommage to Marcolino Gandini intends to underline the most revolutionary moment of his production, the 1960s. The art critic Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco defines the period 1962-1963 as the “blue period”, when Gandini’s canvases are characterized by a reduced chromatic range, with greys, pale blues and whites, defined by a dense and material painting layer. Together with these first attempts, the room shows, also through Tela modellata [Modeled canvas] from 1965, donated by the author in 1989 for the City of Venice collections, the path that Gandini undertakes to explore space and “exit” the canvas. The so-called “monumental period” is expressed in large-scale works, where the support, often made of plywood, is curved and supports the modeled canvas. The colors become colored stripes to create vibrant optical effects; the work is no longer two-dimensional and becomes abstract architecture.
Gandini finds a way out of the colors of the Gruppo dei Sei and the stylistic features of the more recent Arte Povera, while recalling, in the line and geometric rigor, the style of Giulio Paolini. Music is fundamental in all his production, as he himself defines in De bello picturae: «The harmony of colors and the deep syncopation of lines build in space what music builds in time». Gandini thus creates his very personal interpretation of Abstract art and, despite knowing the American production of Kenneth Noland and Abstract Expressionism, his approach recalls Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus more closely. In the mid-1960s his assemblages take the form of colored structures, which Gandini calls wardrobes. It is a very creative period for him and from the end of the decade he experiments with new materials and ends up abandoning color to create monochrome works in white formica.
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Marcolino Gandini (Turin, 1937- Rome, 2012), son of the musician and composer Marco Gandini and Santina Vaudano, from a young age he frequented the Turin intellectual scene in which his father was involved and came into contact with the painter Felice Casorati and the Gruppo dei Sei. Having moved with his family to Viù, a small village close to the French border, he grew up surrounded by nature; at sixteen he was hospitalized urgently for a cerebral embolus, which caused paralysis of the left side of his body. During his hospitalization he began to draw. Returning to Turin, he studied painting and in 1954 became a pupil of Casorati. He distanced himself from the Master’s style and in 1958 he made his debut in a solo exhibition at Palazzo Chiablese with figurative works where geometry was already of great importance. The definitive turning point towards abstraction took place in 1960. Having moved to Rome in 1963, he developed large-format works with curved canvases. From 1966 he moved from two-dimensional painting to abstract architecture. Protagonist of numerous solo exhibitions, he has participated in group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, winning important international awards.
Admission with the Museum’s hours and ticket.
