Mappe di colore

In continuity with last year’s edition, the exhibition set up at the Antico Ospedale dei Battuti for Palinsesti 2022 is entitled Mappe di colore and aims at presenting examples of artistic experiences characterized by the use of color as the almost exclusive instrument of artistic research: rubber stamps, paint-filled drawings and saturation united with an aniconic attitude at their core were all elements capable of creating an emotionally engaging tension on the canvas. This does not imply an impoverishment of the possible solutions that the artist has at his disposal. On the one hand, Sandi Renko juxtaposes the colors and projects the image with a remarkable and changeable graphic result at the crossroad of art and design, a legacy of the research of arte programmata in the ‘70s and ‘80s. On the other hand, there’s Tetsuro Shimizu, a Japanese painter who went to Milan to study and there discovered the Italian painting tradition; in his canvas, the artist retrieves the impetuous and romantic dimension of light touches of color. Conversely, the research of Pope and Mario Palli pursues the monochrome by focusing on the visual and emotional reaction of color, detaching their works from the mental and analytic approach to paintings. However, every form of abstractionism, even in its most radical outcomes, has a figurative memory from which it gradually distances itself, as is evident in the exhibit’s little tribute to the memory of Walter Zironda. In every instance here on display, even in the most ascetic and disciplined attitude towards painting, the color line carries a high sensibility towards the surfaces and reminds us how the simple application of pigment on the canvas, as well as the immersive experience it carries within, can be not only engaging but even sensual.