Illusione
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is delighted to present the work of Carla Accardi for the first time in its rue de Turenne space. Working hand in hand with the artist and her Foundation for over fifteen years, Illusione is the gallery’s second solo exhibition dedicated to Carla Accardi, following Carla Acardi at Home, that graced the rooms of Casa Corbellini-Wasserman in Milan in 2021.
Accardi’s decade-spanning career saw her experimenting with various mediums and formats, ranging from sicofoil to ceramics and canvas. Growing up in post-war Italy, Accardi is one of the few women of her generation to be recognized for her pioneering artistic practice and political commitment. Her work is strongly informed by her acute self-awareness: in abstraction, Accardi found a formal vocabulary that allowed her to question artifice against truth, symbolism and rationality.
After an extended period experimenting with the plasticity of sicofoil in the 1980’s, Accardi turned to the more rugged, organic features of the hemp canvas, giving way to her iconic interwoven, color block canvases.
At first glance, Illusione appears to be a haphazard sequence of 12 identical canvases. Yet their order and combination is as precise as a mathematical formula, coherent in one precise layout only.
Each sign transcends the border of its individual rectangular canvas, creating an interwoven patterns across the work. The shapes are ornamental and rhythmical at once. One against the other, her color fields create a high contrast effect, whilst appearing connected in harmony by the homogeneous linen canvas background. A sense of flow emerges from the intertwining shapes, and the negative forms that emerge from each color.
The illusion of simplicity, or the simplicity of illusion, thus unfolds horizontally across the twelve canvases, hinting at a secret code perhaps, or spelling out a message that Accardi only holds the key to.
Carla Accardi’s work has been selected by Cecilia Alemani for the Venice Biennale’s exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” on view till November in the Giardini dell’Arsenale.
The Artist
Carla Accardi (1924 - 2014) is one of the most important exponents of abstract painting in Italy after World War II. Born on October 9, 1924, in Trapani, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence before moving to Rome in 1946, where she founded the influential postwar group Form 1 (1947–51), the main reference for abstract art in Italy in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Her early paintings consisted of interlocking geometric forms. In the 1950s, Accardi was involved in the wide-reaching attempts to revolutionize abstraction through the hybridization of geometric and gestural painting, both in Italy and in France, where art critic Michel Tapié took an interest in her work. In 1953 Accardi began to introduce pseudo-calligraphic signs into abstract images, while reducing her palette to white-on-black compositions to explore the relationship between figure and ground.
In the 1960s, however, there is a rejuvenation of color in her works with references to the metropolitan culture and optical effects. Accardi’s artistic research was characterized by a continuous experimentation radicalized with the use of transparent plastic supports that accentuate the nature of the painting as a luminous diaphragm. In 1961 indeed, she began painting on sicofoil, a transparent plastic, instead of canvas. She showcased these new strategies at the 1964 Venice Biennale. By the mid-1960s, she was using these new materials sculpturally. This phase of Accardi’s oeuvre, which was celebrated in the Ambiente/Arte section of the 1976 Venice Biennale, would prove infl uential for Arte Povera. In the 1980s she returned to canvas and shift ed her focus to the use of signs and chromatic juxtapositions. In 1988 she participated again at the Venice Biennale, while in 1994 she took part to Th e Italian Metamorphosis 1943–1968, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1994.
Her work is part of many important collections, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Castello di Rivoli (Turin), the Gallerie Civiche of Modena and Bologna, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and the Museo Civico in Turin. Th e artist died in Rome on February 23, 2014.