Carla Accardi

Galleria Minini, Brescia
Through September 15

Carla Accardi's exhibition in Brescia presents a group of Trasparenti in various sizes, all works made by the artist in 1976 in sicofoil – one of the artist's favorite materials since the Sixties – that were never shown before. Accardi, among the first on the international scene, felt the need to dematerialize the piece on which she was working.

Her path – begun with the studies of Forma I and continuing with experimentation on colored sign and plastic materials – has found a new source of inspiration in the use of a transparent and flexible material of almost unlimited expressive possibilities. Sicofoil can be covered by the artist or left unpainted, used with or without a frame, cut into strips or in irregular geometric forms. Standing out in the group of works using this material are Rosso, Nero, Marrone, Verde, done using large strips wrapped around the frame and painted with brightly colored shapes repeated at regular intervals.

Trasparenti are in the most extreme part of this research and represent the artist's ambition towards the pure constructive potential of this material. In these works, sicofoil is used in 10 cm wide strips and wound, completely unpainted, around the axes of a frame. The "emotional sense" of the work comes from the type of weave of the strips. Some are simple and reassuring, woven of a woof and warp in a regular pattern; others have an expressionist relationship between positive and negative, full and empty; strips of sicofoil composing the weave in violent forms, placed on the surface in an uneven and hasty manner. Others defy the laws of gravity: humorous and spirited, the strips create improbable but miraculously stable weaves.

The rigidity and yellowing arising from the aging of the material don't take away from the meaning of the work; rather they amplify the expressive potential.




Antonella Crippa
Translation by Joanne Tedone