"Rhythms / Light"

RICCARDO GUARNERI

Riccardo Guarneri was born in Florence in 1933. After attending the Scuola Libera del Nudo (Free School of the Nude), in his twenties he began painting at the same time as a musical activity that saw him perform with pop music orchestras in Italy and abroad. After his first figurative paintings he moved closer to informal, as Guarneri himself recounts in an interview with Giovanna Uzzani published in the catalog of the 2004 Palazzo Pitti anthological exhibition: “Then came 1958 and painting became more important, more serious. I was still groping. Between 1958 and 1959 I found myself in Holland, in The Hague, playing. I fell in love with the self-portraits of the last Rembrandt. Nothing could be more informal. On coarse backgrounds dark as night there appeared to me flashing marks, thunderbolts of light, golden gleams. So I began to be inspired by Rembrandt in my informal canvases, though no one noticed. It was the light, it was those flashes that interested me. Even then I sensed the theme of light as central, but I still didn't know how to give up the subject matter and I was thinking of Wols and also Alechinsky. Then I realized I felt Cobras was too violent and instinctive, so I was rather attracted to Licini's purity, Klee's lyrical inventions. When I returned to Florence, I discovered that Fiamma Vigo had opened the new space in Via degli Artisti, a meeting place for abstract painters and adventurous young people. An opportunity arose for an exhibition in '59, it was titled Baldi - Fallani - Guarneri - Masi - Verna. Five Informals in Florence.” Guarneri's debut exhibition saw him still linked to the informal sphere but, as the artist recounts, these were “...fervent years, everything was as if overwhelmed by experiences, by discoveries. In 1959 I went for the first time to Germany, to Düsseldorf. I was still painting informally. I began to tour the studios of those painters who I felt were closest to my research. Northern Europe then appeared to me as an extraordinary forge, laboratory, exciting network of experimentation, a living, nervous, cosmopolitan reality. I met Otto Piene, Peter Brüning, Hansjorg Glattfelder. Then also Raimond Girke and Winfred Gaul. I used to go to their studios and we became friends, even though I was younger.” His first solo exhibition was at Galerie de Posthoorn in The Hague in 1960, a year in which Guarneri was also at Abstracte Italiensee Kunst in Ostend and at Modern Paintings of Italy at Rose Marie Gallerie in Taipei, while 1961 saw his solo show with Claudio Verna at Galleria L'Indiano in Florence and 1962 at Galleria San Matteo in Genoa. In 1962 Guarneri began to take an interest in color as light, handwriting as painting and the problems inherent in visual perception. From this moment on, sign, light and color are identified, substantiating a poetic world of acute sensibility and constituting, although in its different phases, the common thread of a decidedly personal research. The first very clear paintings are born, in which space is marked by luminous variations and whose surfaces are treated mainly in pencil. These works are first revealed in 1963 in the solo exhibition at La Strozzina in Palazzo Strozzi. It is Guarneri again who recalls the overcoming of the Informal and the change in his research in the early 1960s: “The frequentation of German friends offered me confirmations, suggested ways out of the Informal, encouraged me in the search for painting. In my canvases there were already new suggestions of light and the first effects of transparency. Then my informal abstract paintings began to lighten and the search for light renewed in me the love for the landscape of the North, in Germany, in Holland, in Finland, that crystalline light, without moisture, without weight. That's how I lightened the tones more and more, subtracting matter, decanting, I arrived at the silence of white. But it was not a sudden choice.” In 1963, with Giancarlo Bargoni, Attilio Carreri, Arnaldo Esposto and Gianni Stirone, Guarneri formed the Tempo 3 Group, whose formal program, starting from Rothko's lesson and gestalt theories, hoped to overcome the opposition between concretism and informal by posing itself as the third tempo of abstract painting. From 1964 onward, the work acquired a more rigorous and geometric structure: “I allowed myself to be won over by the geometric pattern of rhombi or squares repeated in imperceptible asymmetry, unfolding through carefully calculated successions. An effect of eurythmy is achieved with the help of colors, or rather colored lights, which replace the old timbral color by determining effects of poetry through the use of the primary elements of light and rhythm of space. [...] I also had in mind Josef Albers' homage to the square, with those effects of dynamic tension, of compression, that arose from the pattern of squares organized not around the same center; for Albers, too, the square meant purity of form and an escape from emotional implications, seeking a basic module in relation to its multiples. But for me Albers was too logical, geometric, I preferred to be more ambiguous, I did not have his faith in pure form, I came from existentialism.” Guarneri's research, by now mature and original, is rewarded with an invitation to the XXXIII Venice Biennale (where he shares a room with Agostino Bonalumi and Paolo Scheggi) and to the exhibition Weiss auf Weiss at the Kunstalle in Bern, while his participations in the V Paris Biennale and the Nuova Tendenza exhibitions are from 1967. Numerous solo shows were held in Italy and Europe in the 1960s: at Galleria Gritti in Venice in 1964, Galleria II Bilico in Rome in 1965, Galleria il Paladino in Palermo in 1966, Galleria La Carabaga in Genoa and Galleria 3A in Lecce in 1967, Studio d'informazione Estetica in Turin in 1968 and Galleria Flori in Florence in 1969. Just since 1969 the painting “continued to refine itself. Almost white paintings were born, readable only by prolonged observation that provoked a perceptual refinement. [...] the colors were the result of luminous and changing transparencies and were transformed into color-light. The signs had been transformed and, from individual and signifying, had become lighter, more dense and regular, mere transcription of an imperceptible movement of the wrist. [...] But in the end the structure must continually reckon with a light that consumes and undoes it.” In 1972 Guarneri held a first anthological exhibition of more than sixty works that closed a decade of activity at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, while solo shows at the Galleria Peccolo in Livorno, Galleria La Polena in Genoa, Galleria Morone 6 in Milan, and Galerie Loehr in Frankfurt were also held in the same year. This was followed by solo shows in 1973 at the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice and those in 1974 at the Godel Gallery in Rome and Galerie December in Münster; that at Galerie December in Dusseldorf in 1976 and at Galerie Artline in The Hague in 1978. Other exhibitions include participations in the 1973 Quadriennale in Rome, the 1974 Milan Biennial, and in historical exhibitions on Italian art: L'immagine attiva at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan in 1971 and, in the same year, XX Mostra Internazionale del Fiorino at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; Europa/America, l'astrazione determinata 1960-76 at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna in 1976; and Linee della ricerca artistica in Italia 1960-1980 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1981. “Late 1970s. A sense of dissatisfaction took hold of me with respect to my previous work, the paintings were now coming out too well, they were too perfect, I felt the need for a rebellion, the need to find a way out of such relentless rigor was maturing in me. [...] I kicked the geometric rigor, abandoned myself to the effects of chance and stain, agreed to let what seemed to me the “romantic” and “sentimental” aspect of my inspiration prevail. [...] The first appreciable results of the new course of my painting came around 1982. The countless watercolor stains were superimposed very clearly one on top of the other, filtered by a tissue of Japanese rice paper that I glued on the canvas and used instead of the usual preparation.” The results of these researches found space in the exhibition entitled Equilibrio, held in May 1984 at the Palazzo Pretorio in Certaldo (in collaboration with GNAM in Rome), where Guarneri exhibited together with Aricò, Uncini, Conte, Lorenzetti, and Napoleone. “At the end of the 1980s it happened that I got tired of papers. The work was long and the craft preparation was tedious, absorbing me too much. So I decided to return to canvas, but without giving up watercolor, which I liked for its lightness. [...] And so came the 1990s, in which I was confirmed in my ideas, in my way of understanding painting, sometimes with a request for geometric rigor in the structure, sometimes instead with freer, more rhythmic and chromatic moments.” In 2000 the artist is confronted with a totally new experience, creating the project for the 24-square-meter mosaic of the Lucio Sestio station of the Rome subway. In these years the artist is invited to important exhibitions on the history of Italian art in Italy and abroad: Abstract. Secessioni astratte in Italia dal dopoguerra al 1990 at the Galleria Civica di Verona in 1990; Arte in Italia 1956-1968 at the Museo Civico di Conegliano Veneto in 1995; Die andere Richtung der Kunst. Abstrakte Kunst Italiens '60-'90 at the Kunsthalle Cologne in 1997; Continuità. Art in Tuscany 1945-2000 at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in 2002. In 2004, the anthological exhibition Contrappunto luce was held at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna of Palazzo Pitti in Florence. A catalog was published for the occasion, with critical essays by Giovanna Uzzani and Maria Grazia Messina, statements by the artist and an anthology of critical writings, to this day a reference text for Guarneri's work. Since the mid-2000s, as part of a renewed critical interest in analytical painting, exhibitions dedicated to its protagonists have flourished in Italy and abroad, to which Riccardo Guarneri (one of the first exponents of this artistic current) is punctually invited. In 2007 he was in Milan, at the Palazzo della Permanente, for the exhibition Pittura Analitica. Italian Paths 1970-1980 and in numerous private galleries. In 2015 he is among the artists in An Idea of Painting. Analytical Abstraction in Italy, 1972-1976 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Udine, and in 2016 he participated in two other group exhibitions, Pittura Analitica. The 1970s, at the Mazzoleni Art gallery in London, and The Years of Analytical Painting. The protagonists, the works, the research at the Palazzo della Gran Guardia in Verona. In 2017 he was invited to other exhibitions on analytical painting: Pittura Analitica ieri e oggi at the Mazzoleni Gallery in Turin, and Pittura analitica: origini e continuità, located in the two venues of Villa Contarini (Piazzola sul Brenta, PD) and the Rocca di Umbertide. We also recall his participation in the historical exhibitions Pittura Aniconica at the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua in 2008; Il Grande Gioco. Forme d'arte in Italia 1947-1989 at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan in 2010; Percorsi riscoperti dell'arte italiana. VAF-Stiftung 1947-2010, at the Mart in Trento and Rovereto in 2011; and 100% Italy. One Hundred Years of Masterpieces, held at the Ettore Fico Museum in Turin in 2018. These years also saw Guarneri as the protagonist of important solo exhibitions: in 2015 at Galerie 21 in Livorno and in no less than three Milanese galleries (Il Milione, Antonio Battaglia and Clivio), ending with the New York exhibition at the Rosai Ugolini Modern gallery. In 2016, however, it was the Michela Rizzo galleries in Venice and Progetto Elm in Milan that exhibited a wide selection of the artist's works. Progetto Elm replicates in 2017 by presenting Guarneri's works in a solo show at Artissima, the prestigious international fair in Turin. Also in 2017, recognition comes to the artist with an invitation from Christine Macel to the 57. Venice International Art Biennale Viva Arte Viva, fifty years after his first Biennale in 1966. Instead, 2018 began with a London trip for a solo exhibition organized by Ian Rosenfeld at Gallery Rosenfeld in London, a gallery with which Guarneri continues to collaborate to this day, exhibiting in solo and group shows. Rosenfeld himself presents his work in 2019 at Art Brussels and Frieze Art Fair (New York). A solo exhibition held at Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano Veneto, however, is from 2018. In 2019, the Museo del Novecento in Milan included a work by Guarneri as part of the museum's reorganization, inaugurating a new exhibition itinerary. The Museo del Novecento in Florence, meanwhile, dedicates a solo exhibition to him, as do the Giraldi Gallery in Livorno and the Visual Arts Department in Soresina. In 2021 four of his works became part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2022 and 2023 he exhibits together with Giorgio Griffa at Galleria FerrarinArte in Legnago and at Kromya Art Gallery in Lugano. Also in 2023 he is instead with Hemmes at the Piaggio Museum in Pontedera. Parallel to his solo exhibitions, Guarneri is also invited to important group shows: at the Museo della Città in Livorno, the Museo di Villa Croce and the Museo di Palazzo Reale in Genoa, and the Abbazia di Montecassino. Riccardo Guarneri has taught painting at the Academies of Fine Arts in Carrara, Bari, Venice and Florence and is also Academic Emeritus for the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, the city where he has always lived and worked.