Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is proud to present
The Appearance of Painting / L’Apparire della Pittura
Opening: Thursday, November 28th, 2023, 6:30 PM
From November 29th through January 15th, 2024.
From Tuesday to Saturday, from 3 pm to 7 pm
Curated by Glenda Cinquegrana. With a interview to Giorgio Bonomi by Arianna Baldoni. In collaboration with Archivio Claudio Olivieri, Milan.
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is glad to present the personal show dedicated to Italian painter Claudio Olivieri deceased in 2019. The show goes by the title The Appearance of Painting and was realized in collaboration with Archivio Claudio Olivieri, Milano. Through a significant core of works from the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties it aims to reveal the refined research of the master who was born in Rome but chose Milan as his abode.
Accompanied by an interview with art critic Giorgio Bonomi realized by Arianna Baldoni, curator of the artist’s archive, the title of the show, The Appearance of Painting, hints to a possible repositioning of the artist well beyond the role of protagonist of Analytical Painting. According to the two critics, Olivieri’s pictorial form has a very particular visual vocation that can be understood through the concept of appearance, meaning painting as an act of manifestation. Within an already strong conceptual concentration, Olivieri’s abstraction appears as a smart and poised balance of opposites, an oxymoron of visible and invisible, a constant trade-off between concealing and revealing, between all and nothing. The personality of the artist, who loved to write aphorisms heaped with antinomies, emerges clearly in his paintings, which take an ambiguous stance between depth and surface, between passion and rational clarity. After all, as Vittorio Fagone said in 1969, duration in Olivieri’s work acquires a very specific dimension: the sum of the distances inside the pictorial field is not considered as a sequence of absences, but as the specification of relations1.
Within an itinerary, which is only partially chronological, the show presents some original and museum-quality works from the Seventies juxtaposed with works from the Eighties and Nineties in order to outline an evolutionary trait in Olivieri’s painting, which from somber and dramatically assertive, acquires a greater sensuality in the shapes, together with a strict tempo.
Finally, the show is completed by a selection of hardly ever published works on large-format paper. The latter witness Olivieri’s work practice ranging from large canvases to a less challenging medium such as paper. Olivieri seems capable of expressing himself through a type of painting, which by subtracting weight, gains more subtlety and rarefaction, and even spontaneous gestural expressiveness.
1 Fagone V., Claudio Olivieri, in Il Milione n. 136, Milano, 15th November – 4th December1969
The exhibition will be accompanied by the catalogue “Claudio Olivieri” with an interview with G. Bonomi by A. Baldoni, ed. Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting, Milan, 2023.
