Storia di un grado zero 1956-1963: le opere, i documenti

This coming 23rd January, starting from 4pm, the P420 ARTE CONTEMPORANEA gallery opens in Bologna (p.zza dei Martiri 5/2, Bologna, tel. +39 (0)51 4847957) with the exhibition “Dadamaino – Piero Manzoni. History of a zero degree. 1956-1963: the works, the documents (until 6th March 2010). The exhibition brings together two artists who participated contemporaneously, and often side by side, in a period of incredible artistic innovation, breathing the same avant-garde air and creating works from it that are diverse but with clear common denominators. As Flaminio Gualdoni explains in the introduction to the catalogue, “The Manzonian achrome like the volumi that Dadamaino wants “waiting for something” – and in this “waiting” is all the love and support of Lucio Fontana – are a sort of resetting of the codified notion of the work. First of all, they are not rhetorically a “degree zero”: which renders their artworks, beyond biographic happenings, the main accomplices in a decisive rupture in art after the Second World War.” And it is exactly this aspect of resetting of traditional painting, in favour of a concept itself completely new art, that this shows wants to highlight. “A surface of limitless possibilities”, is how Piero Manzoni defines the canvas when introducing a solo exhibition of Dadamaino in 1961. The artworks of Dadamaino (Milan, 1935 – 2004) on display are: Volumi, artworks in which at the end of the fifties with a meditated but peremptory gesture the artist rips the canvas, overcoming in an instant the constraint of considering the canvas itself as the place of painting; Volumi a fori regolari, with which Dadamaino matches the tabula rasa of the rip with the rigorous and sequential order of circular geometry; Volumi a moduli sfasati, an ingenious representation of the infinite, achieved by die-cutting and mounting plastic shower curtains onto the frame; Rilievi on canvas and paper; oggetti ottico-cinetici and optical artworks, which the artist took, at the end of 1962, to the main international exhibitions adhering to the Nouvelle Tendence group. “I have always researched materials, forms, situations, everything that could be researched,” is how Dadamaino himself, in 1980, summarised the innovative spirit of his own ingenious work. From the work of Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 – 1963) the pieces on exhibition are some of the Achrome series (sewn canvases, wads and packages) which represent the degree zero of limited pictorial expression through exhibition of his basic materials; tavole di accertamento, merda d’artista and other artworks, including linee, which “express the concept of the infinite much more than any other kind of painting” – as Manzoni himself put it. Lucio Fontana’s words on this subject are significant, “The line of Manzoni, the end of art.” The exhibition, and this is the calling card of the new P420 ARTE CONTEMPORANEA gallery, will leave ample space for documentation, enriching the display through the exhibition of precious catalogues, invitations, typescripts and short films, enabling the outline of the artistic and exhibitive route of these two artists from 1956 to 1963, with particular evidence of the numerous intersections. And it is precisely this successful artworks - documents binomial that allows even the least qualified visitor to place the artworks in a precise cultural context and therefore also allows them to appreciate the historic-artistic value. “This exhibition is a good demonstration of the tone we want to give to the P420 ARTE CONTEMPORANEA gallery – confirmed Alessandro Pasotti and Fabrizio Padovani – that is, the presentation of artists in their historical context who gave life to the main avantgarde after the Second World War, from the Informal of the fifties to the more recent experiences of the seventies, via the destruction of Zero and Nul, the artistic and cultural innovations of Conceptual Art, Land Art, Minimalism, Narrative art, Performance art, optickinetic art and Arte Programmata, Arte Povera, Fluxus and multimedia demonstrations, Visual and Concrete Poetry, New Painting, etc, without ever forgetting the fundamental contribution that original documentation brings to the exhibition, outlining the exhibitive history of these same artists.”