MACRO presents “Canone Aureo” (“The Golden Ratio”), an exhibition of new works by Giorgio Griffa, one of the greatest names in contemporary Italian painting. Specially created by the artist for the Museum, four large canvases interpret its architecture and create an immediate dialogue with its surfaces.
Canone Aureo (“The Golden Ratio”) is the title chosen to indicate the guiding thread that runs through the Griffa’s latest works, which are based on considerations about the golden ratio and about the dialogue between art and science. In this cycle of works, the artist focuses on the golden number, which was first formulated by Euclid in the fourth century BC in Greece. It is the basis for the calculation used to divide a segment into two parts, in which the lesser is to the greater as the greater is to the whole. The result of this ratio, which has been a symbol of harmony and equilibrium, but also of the unknown and of wonderment ever since ancient times, is 1.618033988..., a recurring number with an infinite amount of figures after the decimal point. They unfurl upon Griffa’s canvases accompanied by sequences of lines that may be delicate or lively, vertical or horizontal, curved or oblique.
The artist talks about his idea of painting and describes the origin of his works in these terms: “[...] I realise that a pillar of painting has always been its relationship with the unknown, which is the furthest point, the point around which my work revolves. So I realised that painting has the most ancient and deeply rooted narrative capacity, [...] I need to find this sense of narrating this world, this time, not from without but from within, entering into the unknown. When I found myself facing the Golden Section, not as a golden rectangle but as a golden number, this extraordinary invention of a number that has been going on for 2300 years, and that will carry on until the end of time, for millions of years, [...] from that very moment I started using this number as a way of telling a tale. [...] It’s a way of knowing the infinite through the humble presence of a little number.”
The number is now explored in its purest and most original form, though it previously appeared in his works as a space-time reference that helped illustrate the chronological sequence of the canvases and establish the position and quantity of the elements they contained. Through these original works, which are created on raw canvas and shown without the support of a frame (a constant feature of his art since the 1960s), Giorgio Griffa has taken them to a monumental pictorial dimension that examines the theme of mathematics, which he uses to perform an analysis of colour and abstraction.
“[...] it is the paint itself that introduces these aspects of representation, intellect and emotion into its memory, without any need for me to superimpose a memory of my own”. The graphic signs are anonymous and do not preserve the painter’s personal memory, but bear only what has settled within them over the centuries. The ambiguity and the mystery of the golden number brings about a dialectic interaction that involves contrasting concepts such as past and present, known and unknown, and memory and contingency, which are in mutual conflict and yet bound together by a constant dialogue that is still highly topical today.
This is therefore an open form of research and one that is constantly being renewed, taking inspiration from problems of a mathematical origin, not in order to convey or reproduce its methodologies in a systematic manner, but to shed light on the irrational and on what cannot be conveyed in scientific terms. The artist expresses his idea very clearly: “science aims to extract what can be known from the unknown, whereas art aims to know what remains unknowable and, by knowing it, you know that it will remain there, forever inexpressible.”
Giorgio Griffa was born in 1936 in Turin, where he lives and works. He started creating his art in the 1960s and became one of the greatest contemporary Italian painters. His artistic research is characterised by its pure analysis of colour, of action, and of line, and his investigations focus on the means and principles of painting. His first exhibition came in 1968 at Galleria Martana in Turin, where he also worked with Galleria Sperone, while in New York and Paris he was with the Sonnabend Gallery. He exhibited regularly in international galleries and was given a room of his own at the 39th Venice Biennale (1980). GAM in Turin devoted a solo exhibition, “Uno e Due” to him in 2001. International events, starting with the famous “Processi di pensiero visualizzati” exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne (1970), include “Contemporanea” in the underground car park at Villa Borghese in Rome (1973), “Arte in Italia 1960/77” at GAM, Turin (1977), the 38th Venice Biennale (1978), “L’informale in Italia” at GAM, Bologna (1983), “Il museo sperimentale di Torino” at Castello di Rivoli (1985), the 11th Quadriennale di Roma (1986), “Pittura italiana dal dopoguerra ad oggi” at M.A.S.P. in Sao Paulo, Brazil (1989), “Torino e le arti 1950/1970” at Castello di Rivoli (1993), “Museo Museo Museo” at GAM, Turin (2006), and “Time & Place” in Stockholm and Zurich (2008).