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GIORGIO GRIFFA:

Director of the Centre d'Art

Contemporain, Genève

Born in Turin in 1936, Giorgio Griffa is now ranked as one of Italy's

most important abstract painters of the Twentieth Century. He began

to paint when he was very young, just 10 years old, and for two decades

his work was figurative, fairly traditional in subjects and style. His mature

work developed later, in the mid Sixties, in the context of the abstract-

expressionist and tachiste movements, which based their language on

a concept of painting as a sequence of actions, like a repeated sign

or form of writing. Rather than a representation, painting became the

direct expression of a mental state, a precise psychic temperature,

an internal beat.

Historically, his work has been classified as part of this "analytical

painting" movement, which concentrated on analysing itself and its

internal mechanisms: surface, substrate, colour and sign. However,

Giorgio Griffa's work seems to stand apart from that of his fellow artists,

and nowadays it is difficult to place it firmly within the historic analytical

and conceptual painting movements. His abstract works, consisting

of simple signs repeated on the canvas, seem to be not so much an

analysis of the act of painting as a homage to painting itself and its

history. And this is one of the delightful, central paradox's of Griffa's work:

in spite of their conceptual approach, his paintings have a fascinating

lyrical component, a radiant musicality, very different from the cold,

unemotional mood of the neo-avantgardes.

In this sense his works are something of a mystery for the art world,

as lovely as they are indefinable, because in them everything seems to

be at once both simple and complex. The types of canvas the artist uses

(jute, hemp, cotton or linen) are simple. His painted signs are also simple,

or even anonymous: a series of vertical or horizontal lines and - only

from the Eighties onwards - stylised floral motifs, friezes and spirals. Yet

Griffa entrusts this apparent simplicity with the task of saying what is

unsayable by its very nature; of plumbing the depths of the mystery of

creation and the unknown. Seemingly banal and obvious at first glance,

Griffa's work is actually layered with references to the history of art,

Stone Age painting, Zen philosophy, music and – as we have seen – the

artistic avantgarde of his own age.

All these characteristics are very much to the fore in the artist's

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