MARSALA - A sign that from one decade to the next widens and shrinks, changes shape, passes from the black-white contrast to color, keeps its capacity for suggestion unchanged.
It investigates how Carla Attardi and Antonio Sanfilippo, among the protagonists of Italian painting of the second half of the twentieth century, confronted each other on this ground, the exhibition that in the Museo del Carmine, in Marsala, brings together about fifty works until next January 10th.
Of the two Sicilian artists - she was born in Trapani in 1924, he in Partanna in 1923 - `` The adventure of the sign '', curated by Sergio Troisi, tells for the first time in parallel the artistic and personal path, from the beginning in the field constructivist at the end of the forties, in the following decade which projected both on the international scene, until the beginning of the seventies.
Their adventure began immediately after the end of the war with the adhesion to the Forma 1 group, established in Rome with Pietro Consagra, Ugo Attardi, Renzo Vespignani, Giulio Turcato, Piero Dorazio and Mino Guerrini.
'' We proclaim ourselves formalists and Marxists '', they stated in the manifesto published in 1947 in which, among other things, the painting was also attributed the function of '' decorative complement to a wall '' and a sculpture that of furnishing a room.
In December of the previous year, a collective trip to Paris had shown them the legacy of the artistic avant-gardes of the century and would have had a decisive weight in their evolution, orienting them towards a post-cubist style.
"We were the generation open to Europe," Consagra explained.
Carla Accardi and Antonio Sanfilippo married in 1949 and until the mid-1960s they shared a long stretch of life together.
'They were taken as a couple.
They learned from each other ", so Dorazio described them.
The exhibition, with many large-format works, also in the setting highlights the elements that unite the two artists and the differences in their path, passing, explains Troisi, '' from the works of the Forma Group to the paintings of the mid-1950s , with a room dedicated to works in which the reduction of color to white, black and gray highlights the more structural character of Accardi's sign and the more lyrical one of Sanfilippo;
from the luminous drafting of iridescent colors of Accardi's paintings of the early 1960s to that, of the same years, in which the sign of Sanfilippo shrinks into wandering shapes like constellations ''.
The gaze also points '' to Accardi's experimentation of an industrial and transparent material such as sycofoil which corresponds, in Sanfilippo, to the adoption of large empty spaces ''.
"The sign is the essential element of expression, the first degree of a form, the articulation of a language" Sanfilippo stated in 1956, expressing a common guiding principle.
For Carla Accardi, the turning point was 1954, with that change of position in front of the canvas.
'' I lay down and make signs not in black and white, which would be writing, but white on black, '' he said.
For both, the use of color became fundamental in the early 1960s.
Between the end of the decade and the beginning of the next, the production of Sanfilippo gradually thinned out until it stopped completely.
'' In the paintings of these years - observes the curator - the enlarged sign is often a contour that closes the white background of the canvas, sometimes in the shape of a sickle or pincer;
at other times, in the extreme works, the brushstroke widens, splitting the movement of brown, black and gray colors into several nuclei ''.
In that same period '' Accardi has long been developing research on transparency in the direction of an installation and environmental dimension.
Even in these works the color is applied with larger signs, for reasons now far removed from those of Sanfilippo;
however it is difficult to escape the suggestion of reading in some works of the first half of the seventies characterized by a less bright and joyful color, when Sanfilippo was entrenched in his silence, still the scent of a distant dialogue, albeit now one-sided.
Almost a form of leave ''.
Antonio Sanfilipo died in 1980 from the consequences of a road accident.
Carla Accardi in the eighties returned to painting on canvas and continued to produce and exhibit in Italy and abroad.
He died in Rome in February 2014.
(ANSA).