Lucia Di Luciano
10 A.M. ART, Milan
@ Art Brussels 2023
20 – 23 April 2023
LUCIA DI LUCIANO
Courtesy 10 A.M. ART, Milan
Photo by Mattia Mognetti
For Art Brussels 2023, 10 A.M. ART Gallery presents a solo show by LUCIA DI LUCIANO, invited to the 59th Venice Biennale International Art Exposition, curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Lucia Di Luciano is an artist of primary importance in Italian Programmed Art. The role of Italy, in the developments of the “New Tendency” exhibition held in 1961 in Zagreb, was very important. This is the context in which Lucia Di Luciano has her place. Her research is directed towards explorations and conclusions involving logic and mathematics, towards the definition of geometric modules that allow her artistic activity to be combined with architecture and industrial design. The work produced by Lucia Di Luciano takes its cue from an analysis of visual processes originating from Gestalt theory, and they are placed in an approach which we could describe as structuralist, featuring painting-based investigations of a mathematical nature. The desire to conform to rigorous geometric rules led, in the works from the 1960s, to the development of a mark as image in which colour, as a potentially emotive and subjective factor, is banished. What is dominant are the mere operational processes that create form. The works of this period present a sort of fundamental alphabet, articulated alternatively in accordance with rhythmic progressions and structurations of geometric modules produced by lines, squares and rectangles.
On the one hand, these cancel all distinction between figure and background, generating a perceptual instability between positive and negative. On the other hand, however, they engender an effect of overlapping grids that give the image a clear multidimensionality. The works created by Di Luciano explicate at the highest level, in their black-and-white severity, in the modular and reiterated nature of the forms-cum-marks, the utopia of an art that aims to reflect on its own function in the context of a new society founded on technology. Painting thus becomes an epistemological metaphor, in which the central idea is the procedure, rather than the result: indeed, the possibility of controlling and preordaining the visual result, of programming it on the basis of a method of construction of the image that is rigorous and objective, goes hand-in-hand with the activation of a virtual movement that the observer is led to follow and complete by taking part, by means of their own perceptual and mental mechanisms, in the generation of the work itself.
Later, there was a return to colour also for Lucia Di Luciano: in a non-systematic way between the 60s and 70s, and thereafter, down to her more recent works, with the gradual introduction of primary hues. This would not be a betrayal of her original propositions, but an inevitable continuation of an investigation into optical perception, as Di Luciano put into practice, for example, in the “Gradienti” series, images full of imaginative verve combined with scientific rigour.
10 A.M. ART Gallery
Corso San Gottardo 5, 20136 Milano
