On 9 October, the Biscozzi | Rimbaud Foundation in Lecce, has opened Sensibilità percettive exhibition, curated by the scientific director Paolo Bolpagni and dedicated to the famous Milanese artist Grazia Varisco. In addition to the artist’s works, the exhibition also offers an insight into the historical-cultural environment in which she has moved. In fact, the post-war scenario offered by the second post-war period was the promoter of new artistic manifestations that tried to resume the interrupted thread of the previous avant-gardes.

From that point art restarted to explore the stylistic and theoretical syntheses that were, albeit not all of them, completed by the previous experiences, such as the dissolution of space, time, color and representation of a wider genre. Therefore, starting from the Fifties, we have witnessed the apogee and further breaking of the theoretical and practical schemes, already established with past artistic currents and that expanded their range of action also in the Italian cultural sphere. The avant-garde conception process reduced reality to precise and dynamic rhythms; indeed, retracing the history of art of those years, we see how shapes disappeared to leave room for gaps, dots, engravings, split light effects or even replaced by the expressive power of materials. And it is precisely in this prosperous context that the Milanese Gruppo T was grafted together with Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele Devecchi and Grazia Varisco, all advocates of a type of art which was dedicated to the perceptive processes of real or apparent movement (miriorama). In particular, the great personality of Grazia Varisco revealed, and reveals us thus far, the mysteries of matter, time, space and above all, it teaches us to see everyday reality with a new eye, sensitive to the transcendent, instigated by play and by perceptive doubt of visions.

The ambitions of Grazia Varisco, clearly visible in her production exhibited in Sensibilità percettive (which traces the artist’s career with 17 works, dated from 1957 to 2009), are to be placed in relation to the construction of new languages ​​gradually developed up to today, which sometimes exceed the size of the work and dialogue with the viewer, thus acquiring the value of experimentation, and looking for a renewed conversation, not only in the limited space of the painting, but in time and in the perception of the visitor. Vivid examples of this are Tavola magnetica a elementi quadrati (1959), Extrapagina spartito musicale (1977) e Silenzi (2006). In the pieces featured in the Lecce foundation, this constructive-dialogic experience is well highlighted precisely by that perceptive and playful option, which is proposed in a program developed through determined and aleatory transformations, enriched by multiple formal and communicative variations, to an extent that is summed up precisely in the figure of Varisco. See, in this case, Quadri comunicanti (2008) and Filo rosso G (2009).

And speaking of dialogues, below is the interview with the Milanese artist.

Antonella Buttazzo: We can affirm that the game is one of the key elements of your art. How does it stand between you and the viewer?
Grazia Varisco: Game is the privileged mechanism for growth in the condition of living, that I develop by inviting my audience to play with me at “be an artist” and to feel Time in the movement of magnetic elements on a surface of defined Space. Game is a tool that favors the knowledge of phenomena, even in an unconscious way. My Tavole magnetiche allow and facilitate the perception of the Object/Field relationship for expressive purposes, by exercising contrasting experiences, such as above/below, outside/inside, before/after…

What kind of relationship binds you to your works? How fundamental is doubt within the visual and playful dialogue that is interposed between you and your production?
Doubt is present and protagonist of my thought: it takes shape from precariousness and manifests itself in the provisional nature of the image that changes in movement, even in perceptive ambiguities. While, Chance highlights my Maybes, my Ifs, my Almosts, my Uncertainties, which all take formally place in Extrapagine, or in Spazi potenziali due to probable imbalance; but also in all my visual traps, where the shadow competes with the object that produces it, and in the most recent Quadri comunicanti that exhibits their “straightness” compromised in crooked containers.

In this sense, I would like to ask you, what role do you feel you have played with your artistic production, both in Gruppo T and, more generally, in the world of art?
We are living a very difficult Time in an overturned Space. We find ourselves in a place that, as we are worried, we would like to recognize, and which rightly reproaches us for negligence and carelessness. In the world of Art, the today wiggles uncertain and chaotic in the frenetic globalization, in which I, at this point old and obsolete, have my trot upside down like a Gregor Samsa of other times. I believe that my research in Art expresses in an image the thought that does not give up pursuing the entity of a void that tends to reduce, to reset for discretion in order to recover and regain a “Void to Render”.

If you had to choose a work, among those exhibited in Sensibilità percettive, which encompasses all the principles of your artistic style, which one would it be?
My favorite work is the one that is waiting for me.

Antonella Buttazzo

Info:

Grazia Varisco, Sensibilità percettive
curated by Paolo Bolpagni
09/10/2022 – 08/01/2023
Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud
Pizzetta Giorgio Baglivi 4, 73100 Lecce
www.fondazionebiscozzirimbaud.it