Pittura Analitica

Analytical Painting represents a response to minimalism which, at the start of the 1970s, had taken on a powerful ideological connotation, becoming a dogma that was more or less insuperable. Identifying its date of birth seems at the very least tricky insofar as this experience crossed borders and established itself as a precise linguistic need not only in Italy, but also in the rest of Europe, especially in Germany, France, Holland, Belgium and Britain.
A push from below on the part of those artists who had no intention of bending to the dominant system and who turn to painting with the aim of developing a radical renewal in understanding, aware of the ongoing change and the role played by precursors such as Robert Ryman, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin or Piero Manzoni. A position that avoided any form of backward-looking nostalgia to point towards an inquiry that set itself up as a methodological alternative to conceptual research without any intention of denying it but, if anything, welcoming it within a semantic process. A semantic process which felt the necessity to emerge from the by-then outdated patterns in a context where what was emphasised above all was the autonomy of the work of art, free from any sociological or autobiographical reflection.

London, Mazzoleni Art, May - July 2016