Claudio Olivieri - Pittura oltre la pittura Thu 03 October 2024 - Tue 31 December 2024

The exhibition will reveal the different tones of a dialogue with painting that has always made use of a lucid critical component, from the elaboration of composite works revealing gestural and chromatic superimpositions, with which the artist goes beyond the sirens of informal art, to move on to the passionate reduction of the pictorial exercise to an intimate confrontation with an absolute chromatism, collected and ready to explode, typical of the research in the 1970s, and then to develop into the articulated compositions of space, light and vibrant shadows that characterize his later activity.

The text by Francesco Tedeschi, which accompanies the exhibition catalogue, will specifically examine that “will to paint” that has always translated into being there, into participating in the substance of painting as an active and questioning factor. An assertion that manifests itself in his paintings through their elusive substance. Like other protagonists of a season that sees painting affirm or reaffirm itself beyond the crisis of languages characterizing the era of the Sixties and Eighties, though in a different way, Olivieri is among those who have carried out a process of analysis of the ways and forms of pictorial language, to open up glimpses that seem to go beyond the physicality of color, light and, in a broad sense, painting. This reaffirmation of painting “beyond painting” – beyond the terms in which it can be understood as a material capable of defining a form or an image – to be only painting, is the core of a critical reflection that concerns its original qualification and its open and unpredictable developments.

As the artist wrote in one of his self-reflexive texts from 1980:

“I do not want to talk about a time before or after painting: painting remains there, in what is missing in the word, in its indescribable pure being, which cannot answer because, perhaps, everything is question inside itself.”

(C. Olivieri, Sette dipinti. Seven paintings, Brescia 1980, then in G. M. Accame, F. Gualdoni, Claudio Olivieri. Il corpo dell'idea, Pierluigi Lubrina Editore, Bergamo 1991, p. 152.)