Cortesi Gallery Lugano presents a new exhibition celebrating the expressive purity of white and its materiality, offering visitors a deep exploration of art through total abstraction. Monochrome surfaces’ strength lies in their ability to draw attention to a variety of techniques, materials, textures, structures, and shapes, uniquely highlighting their responsiveness to light and shadow.
SPAZIO TOTALE. L’Arte nella sua forma più pura. Da Lucio Fontana a Günther Uecker TOTAL SPACE. Art in its purest form. From Lucio Fontana to Günther Uecker aims to be a journey through the evolution of contemporary art in the second half of the 20th century. A period characterized by the search for new ideas and the breaking of traditional artistic forms to explore a vision of free art without expressive limits.
The legacy of informal art, in which the gesture becomes the bearer of the artist’s emotion, and the spatial revolution of Lucio Fontana quest us how it is possible to represent a painting of non-representation. Our reservoir of personal and collective memory pushes us to search for meaning in what we observe. Still, the real revolution lies in activating a passive vision, leaving aside the search for recognition and focusing on the essence of form and matter.
Artists such as Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani have discussed the two-dimensionality of the canvas, exploring the infinite spatial variations that it can take on. Castellani, with his predilection for white, represents the absence of colour and emotion and further radicalizes the concept of space introduced by Fontana.
At the same time, the T group’s research on programmed and kinetic art, represented by Grazia Varisco and Gianni Colombo, focuses on the investigation of optical phenomena and perceptive dynamics. The group actively involves the viewer and creates works that emerge from the variation of the image in the timeline.
At an international level, the ZERO group, with artists such as Heinz Mack, Günther Uecker, herman de vries, and Gerhard Von Graevenitz, represents a restart from scratch. Its democratic and impersonal art is expressed through light and movement, using materials of everyday life to create anti-pictorial and accessible art.
The Lugano exhibition also explores the works of Gianfranco Pardi and Giuseppe Santomaso, two artists who, although challenging to pigeonhole into an artistic movement, share attention to materiality and form. Pardi, with his architectures, explored the balance between chromatic backgrounds and steel rods, while Santomaso, in the 1980s, dedicated himself to the formal representation of the materiality of Venetian architecture.
In an era in which art seeks the exceptional nature of emotion, SPAZIO TOTALE. L’Arte nella sua forma più pura. Da Lucio Fontana a Günther Uecker TOTAL SPACE. Art in its purest form. From Lucio Fontana to Günther Uecker presents a return to pragmatism, offering a physical and concrete reality ready to be experienced in its immediacy. These artists invite us to explore the essence of their works not for what they represent but for what they are: a study of materials, forms, and the dynamics of perception, a detail of a broader and more complex composition.
