EURIDICE

Euridice: note sulla collezione | Euridice: notes on the collection

works for CEDIT Ceramiche. For this historic brand, Griffa has created

five works involving a series of lyrical, minimalist signs, which recall the

motifs current in the late Sixties and Seventies. The range of colours in

which these signs are presented, with complementary colours and half-

tones, seem to be drawn from the Renaissance and the art of Venice

and its region in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. The other

fundamental point of reference is Matisse, the painter who rejoiced in

colour and in whose images signs and colours are nicely balanced.

Griffa's collection for CEDIT sets out to use modular repetition of

signs to build up genuine spatial environments for everyday living. The

partnership with a ceramics manufacturer is a particularly fertile one

for the Turin-born artist. In fact, his pictorial language – based on the

concept of an anonymous sign open to potentially infinite repetition –

seems to be ideally suited to large-scale reproduction and the decoration

of entire interiors. The concepts of fragmentation and incompletion can

be easily applied to the decoration of living-spaces of varying sizes, as if

they were "portions" of a larger whole, an expanding universe. All Griffa's

works use a repertoire of timeless signs, actions repeated over the

millennia, on a complex trajectory that combines art, craftsmanship and

decoration. In the project for CEDIT, this ancient story of experimentation

with the potentialities of sign, colour and matter comes to a kind of

natural, fascinating fruition.

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