MINIMALIST unfinished marks on parts of unframed canvases hung from tacks on white walls; this is the “poor art” of Giorgio Griffa, which is rich in meaning and beauty.
An abstract painter, Griffa first became known in the 1960s as part of the Italian generation of Arte Povera artists, who sought to radically redefine painting. Arte Povera literally means “poor art”, a reference to the movement’s use of throwaway materials such as soil, rags, and twigs. In using such everyday materials, these artists aimed to challenge the confines of traditional artistic practices to disrupt the values of the commercialised gallery system.
“A Continuous Becoming” spans the breadth of Griffa’s practice, incorporating works from the 1960s through to today. His are the colours of the Mediterranean; light, airy, precise, pastel. Marks that give the appearance of doodles are, as his sketchbooks demonstrate, meticulously planned and executed. The rhythms and harmonies of his mark-making in space fashion the dynamism of his diagonals, curves, and rectangles.
The marks on his unfolded pinned canvases never extend across the whole — a decision that signs the unfinished nature of our understanding and comprehension. Griffa notes that: “The unfinished painting addresses the temporary nature of knowledge. It is not a metaphor; the painting itself is provisional knowledge. When man had a completed world-view, it was normal that its representation be equally complete, whether figurative or abstract, symbolic or naturalistic. The wondrous discovery that everything varies, everything moves, that what appears to be still simply obeys different schedules of becoming, and the equally marvellous discovery of complexity, shift the focus to becoming itself.”
Mark BlowerInstallation view of “Giorgio Griffa: A Continuous Becoming”, at Camden Arts Centre, London
This is the source of the exhibition’s title, as these unfinished works, these objects not completed, are, therefore, not definitive. The artist’s work is never done, as his organic evolving practice always leads on to the next canvas. His practice is “a continuous becoming, from one canvas to the next”. Time won’t let him finish his works.
The series of paintings Canone aurea uses infinite means to sign this reality. Canone aurea translates as the “golden number” or “golden ratio”. The golden ratio, also known as the divine proportion, appears frequently in many areas of architecture, art, music, nature, and science. It is inherent in the Fibonacci numbers, the octave, and the Platonic solids, and its expression in works of art, since the Renaissance, has been in the form of golden rectangles, pentagrams, spirals, and triangles.
In the modern period, as one example, artists such as Paul Sérusier and Albert Gleizes were inspired by the Beuron Art School of Fr Desiderius Lenz to make use of the golden ratio to achieve harmony and balance in their works.
Euclid defined the golden ratio by dividing a segment according to the extreme and mean ratio, where, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser. The result is an interminable number, which has never ceased to arouse awe and wonder over the centuries.
Griffa states: “The irrational number without end, which resolves the equation of the golden section (1,618003398 . . . ), symbolizes the area of knowledge that has been devoted to art since the time of Orpheus — that is, knowledge of the unknowable. It is an important aspect of Greek knowledge. Rather than proceeding towards a larger number, this number spirals into the unknown: 1.6 will never become 1.7 or / 1,61 will never become 1,62/ 1,618 will never become 1,619/ and so on, and yet the numbering continues without an end.”
Griffa has said that “art and poetry are instruments for knowing that unknown that cannot be exorcised with words or translated into science.” Painting, he says, is silence, is knowledge of the inexplicable with the unknown being “a basic part of life which we carry within ourselves.” We see this, he writes, even in modern science, where “there are theorems about uncertainty (Heisenberg): ‘L’incompletezza’.”
Mark BlowerInstallation view of “Giorgio Griffa: A Continuous Becoming”, at Camden Arts Centre, London
Much critical writing about Griffa’s work focuses on physics and mathematics in exploring his approaches to the infinite, and yet, he writes, even within scientific theorems, “there is a place for the unknown which belongs to the world of art and religion, and is not at all a part of other scientific disciplines.”
This is the unacknowledged, hidden spring of Griffa’s infinitely beautiful and infinitely humble mark-making. Knowledge of the infinite, the inexplicable, belongs primarily to art and religion. “Let’s not forget,” he says, “that religion is humanity’s ‘reality’. I witness that it exists, although it is accepted or rejected by each individual.”
“Giorgio Griffa: A Continuous Becoming” is at Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Road, London NW3, until 8 April. Phone 020 7472 5500.
www.camdenartscentre.org