"Picture object on light gradients"

FRANCO COSTALONGA

Franco Costalonga was born in Venice in 1933. He began his training as a self-taught artist, only later attending the local Art School as a private student, where he followed the teachings of Remigio Butera. After making his debut as an engraver and etcher, winning first prize at the 50th Collective Exhibition of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice, he approached painting, producing a vast series of paintings, characterised, in a subtle chromatic modulation centred on the red and pink scales, by the free and airy expression of elegant graphicisms of mediated Licinian and Wolsian matrix. In the second half of the 1960s, after joining the Gruppo Dialettica delle Tendenze, Costalonga would then elaborate, through the use of new materials, original tensioned surfaces, generating three-dimensional forms. These new procedures would later lead him to approach Bruno Munari, president of the ‘Sette-Veneto’ group, in connection with the Centro Operativo Sincron in Brescia, directed by Armando Nizzi, thus deepening his interest in new kinetic-visual experiences. For these new creations, in 1967 Costalonga was awarded a prize at the 55th Collective Exhibition of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, while the following year, one of his works, ‘Chromo-kinetic-sphere object’ in plexiglass became part of the Guggenheim Collection. A visual artist who is also active in the fields of furniture and design, Costalonga has won numerous awards in these areas. After experimenting with all possible combinations of spherical mirrors, with which he participated in the 1970 Venice Biennale, in 1973 the Venetian artist conceived a new element: a small cylinder whose top was cut at 45° and coloured. First as single units and later assembled into modules of sixty-four, these simple elements gave rise to geometric representations, whose shapes changed in colour intensity in correspondence with the viewer's interaction with the work and the action of light on the colour surface. The ‘Painting Objects on Luminosity Gradients’, this is their name, expanded the field of application of chromatic research - the theoretical relevance of which is fundamental for Costalonga - as they had an almost unlimited programming of their combinations. The subsequent expansions (otherwise known as ‘Modular Destructures’), however, opposed, to the modular and regular system of modules, a fragmentary and peripheral use of the cylinder that responded to the artist's expressive freedom. At the same time as his cine-visual experimentation, in the 1970s Franco Costalonga elaborated, always starting from a single modular element, first the ‘Helicoidal Structures’ and later the ‘Structures on Symmetry Movements’, conceived as a set of flexible or rigid plastic components, combined in a geometric pattern with an upward direction. In the meantime, he took part in numerous national and international exhibitions including: the 11th Quadriennale in Rome in 1966, the travelling exhibition The Arts Council of Great Britain in Venice in the same year; Trigon 71 - Intermedia Urbana in Graz. In 1972 he took part in the exhibition Grands et Jeunes d'aujourd'hui - Art cinetique-Peinture-Sculpture at the Grand Palais in Paris, in 1974 in the InternationaIe Kunstmesse-Art5 in Basel and in 1976 in the exhibition Comtructivismo at the Universidad Central in Caracas. Later, starting in 1978, he joined the Verification Centre 8+l within which, during the 1980s, he would deepen his research characterised by the use of reticular plastic material to generate movements and variations of symmetry. In 1986, he was invited to the Art-Science-Colour section of the XLII Venice Biennale. In 1990, after a long period of inactivity, Franco Rossi, to whose gallery the artist had already been linked in the past, provided the inspiration for a new creation that involved small circular mirrors hung with a nylon thread inside coloured geometric structures. Moving randomly, due to the effect of the air, the ‘moving mirrors’ reflect the light and colour of the sides inside the structure. Still in the area of movement, but this time on the side of the active participation of the viewer with the work, the ‘Tensoforms’ were created, consisting of a perforated sheet of metal and an elastic fabric, on which it is possible to intervene by modifying the surface through a magnet placed on the back of the painting. In the early 1990s, Costalonga again reconsidered metallised PVC by adapting it, in thin sheets, onto the uniformly striped surface of a rigid support. In this way, he created the ‘Pseudorilievi’ where the (possibly grazing) light plays a key role: in contact with the mirror foils, it produces an area of light reflection and an area of shadow that circumscribes a deceptive relief. PVC lamellar material was also used for the ‘Riflexes’, albeit in small fragments; by arranging it on the substrate with a criterion of thickening and rarefaction, highly effective chromatic-luminous refraction solutions were achieved. With the ‘Strutturazioni’ and ‘Destrutturazioni’ Costalonga returns to the painted surface alone after many years: he intervenes with the airbrush to reproduce geometric structures, which he destructures in a second phase. The most recent results of his experimental research, apart from the ‘Mokubi2’, which are the latest three-dimensional variants of the ‘Picture Objects’, are the ‘Extreme Consequences’ and the ‘Modular Curves (Mokurve)’. The former, made of metallised thermoplastic material in high vacuum, result from cleaning the moulds of the small cylinders by assuming random shapes; the latter are instead obtained from the concatenable and modifiable set of curved modular elements. Further evolution was finally made to ‘Mokubi’ with the term ‘Mokudue s.’ These are modular elements placed on a triangular grid that when assembled visually render the appearance of a cube in axonometry. The painted surfaces of the individual faces create an additional vibration that further enlivens the overall image. The last few years have been marked by important exhibitions, at the Ljubljana Castle, the Matalon Foundation in Milan, the National Library in Cosenza, the f.22 Modern Art Gallery in Palazzolo sull'Oglio, where he presented ‘Forty years of visual research’ in 2008, and the Santa Caterina Museum in Treviso. Since the 2000s, he has also been present in exhibitions on international kineticism such as ‘Le Parc, Garcia Rossi, Demarco and other testimonies of kineticism in France and Italy’, Rome and Spoleto, ‘Il cinetismo quarant anni dopo’, Turin, ‘Alberto Biasi, Testimonianze del cinetismo e dell'arte programmata in Italia e Russia, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, “Il cinetismo dalle origini ad oggi”, Zagreb and “Kinetického”, National Museum of Modern Art, Prague. In 2002 the Chromokinetic sphere object purchased by Peggy Guggenheim was exhibited at the exhibition ‘Themes and Variations, Post-War Art from the Guggenheim Collections’, Venice, and in 2007 in Verona in the exhibition ‘Peggy Guggenheim, a Love of Sculpture’. Franco Costalonga died on 19 June 2019.