Gino Morandis


 
Gino Morandis
Front and back composition
1970
100 x 100 cm
Mixed technique on wood

 
GINO MORANDIS (Venezia, 1915 – 1994)

The notion of space, understood in the breadth of its semantic spectrum, recurs significantly in any biography or critical reflection regarding Morandis' painting. To explain its pervasive presence there are historical and iconographic reasons. Together with Bacci, De Luigi and Tancredi, Morandis is one of the most representative exponents of the Venetian Spatialist Movement, which starting from the early fifties intends to decline, with only the tools of painting, the expressive project formalized by Lucio Fontana in his famous Posters. A goal that Morandis pursues by conferring depth and dilatation effects on the painted surface. Traversed by a pulsating luminous vibratility, inhabited by embryos of forms, his images seem to allude, especially in the following decade, to cosmic events and the birth of new universes. The Untitled by Ekilibrio Foundation, hinged on an ideal compositional center from which fragments of 'energies' made of sign and color radiate, is contextual to this expressive direction, presenting at the time pieces of that transparency destined to become a distinctive element of his chromatic drafts. The front-back composition, on the other hand, belongs to a later phase, which sees the artist emphasize the contrast between the figure and the background: this occurs through the contrast of black and white and the clear cut out on the surface of shaped forms in wooden material. Conventionally referring first to the areas first of lyrical abstraction, then to those of the informal, his work implies a thorough assimilation of the painting techniques of the past and the laws that govern the relationship between tones.

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