Symbol, gesture, colour, material. Compositional rhythms, structures, existential spirit: order and disorder, reason and sentiment.
In the long history of aniconic art, which developed intermittently in the West, in parallel to the development of figurative art, the image abandons recognisable figures to emphasise the purely visual idiom, often inspired by a spiritual striving towards the unspeakable.
Already practised in history – as in archaic Greek ceramics, Byzantine painting, and barbarian goldsmithing – this type of representation forcefully came onto the scene in the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, leading to the rise of abstract art, which then pursued different directions (lyrical and geometric) and forms of expression, many of which gave rise to artistic movements founded on a solid theoretical base.
Oriented on the basis of the two main paths undertaken by artists after World War II – the “emotional” poetics of European Informal art and American Abstract Expressionism on one hand, and on the other, a more geometric, constructive, “rational”, even technological vision – this section exhibits a vast selection of works sharing a single common denominator.
Instead of exhibiting the works in chronological order, each wall or panel proposes a different visual experience, freely combining paintings and sculptures that explore a time range of more than seventy years, from the crucial mid-forties to the present day, revealing unexpected derivations and analogies.
Bright colours and monochromes, humble and precious materials, the sensitive tactility of clay and wood in contrast with the severity of iron, the dialogue of light and darkness, offer a rapid succession of perceptions of great evocative impact.
