At the Limit of Painting
Cacciola, Cecchini, Corsini, Griffa, Masi, Olivieri, Wolf, Zappettini.
Opening: Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at 6.30 pm
April 23 to May 16, 2026.
Tuesday to Friday, from 3 to 7 pm.
Curated by Glenda Cinquegrana.
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present the group exhibition At the Limit of Painting, featuring a selection of works by artists associated with the Italian Pittura Analitica movement, including Enzo Cacciola, Vincenzo Cecchini, Giorgio Griffa, Paolo Masi, Claudio Olivieri, and Gianfranco Zappettini. Alongside these key figures of historical Analytical Painting, the exhibition includes Vittorio Corsini and Silvio Wolf, whose practices engage with certain concerns of that period, articulating them through the languages of contemporaneity. The exhibition title alludes to one of the defining characteristics of Pittura Analitica: its sustained investigation into the material conditions of painting, pushed to the point of transforming painting into installation, into process, into an “opaque” object. Emerging in the 1970s in response to a cultural climate that proclaimed the death of painting, Analytical Painting developed in dialogue with parallel international tendencies, including the French Supports/Surfaces, German Geplante Malerei, and American Systemic Painting. Beyond these affinities, it constituted a distinct artistic current, shaped through a series of exhibitions that were crucial to its definition. Yet, while historically circumscribed in time and place, its conceptual and process-oriented approach has resurfaced in the practices of younger generations. Around 1974–75, Enzo Cacciola (Arenzano, Genoa, 1954) developed a practice in which process operates as a means of emotional neutralization, while the use of cement as a pictorial material becomes a defining feature. Vincenzo Cecchini (Cattolica, 1934) explores the relationship between painting and photography, later elaborating a poetics grounded in reflection on the pictorial field as a site of imperfection. For Vittorio Corsini (Cecina, Livorno, 1956), the painting becomes a visual event in which light functions as a threshold, an active material that redefines the codes of vision and engages peripheral sight as ocular perception begins to loosen. Among the most rigorous and consistent in reducing painting to its foundational principles is Giorgio Griffa (Turin, 1936), who dismantles the painting as a three-dimensional support, reducing it to the bare trace of a sign on canvas. Paolo Masi (Florence, 1934), by contrast, employs salvaged cardboard as his support, exploring color through its infinite interactions with an irregular, fragmented surface. Claudio Olivieri (Rome, 1934 – Milan, 2019) developed a painterly language in which color approaches the idea of limit, of a “black light.” Silvio Wolf (Milan, 1952) investigates the foundational conditions of the photographic image—time, light, chance, and the off-camera—while his Horizons reveal a threshold, a sharp limit between light and darkness, matter and language, the visible and the invisible. Gianfranco Zappettini (Genoa, 1939), now regarded as one of the founders of the movement, rigorously explores a process-based painting that becomes either pure light or the surface of a pencil mark.
