[…] The exhibition Rodolfo Aricò. Germinazione di un’idea (Rodolfo Aricò, Germination of an Idea) displays works dating from between 1965 and 1972, and hence proposes a reconstruction a posteriori of the path along which the author came to devise the idea of the shaped canvases. A path that seems linear and coherent, since it is based on two key principles – time and space – dealt with using the very same number of specific tools – bright colour and rigorous form –. […]

[…] By associating geometric rigour with bright colours and forms with inclined profiles, Aricò gave rise to an effect of instability, a perceptive dynamism and plurifocal vision, capable of transforming the surface of the canvas into a beating, changeable and continually expanding space. Indeed, in the four variants of Progetto Assonometria (Axonometry Project, 1967) a neutral ovoidal form, fielded in white and/or yellow and/or green, virtually acquires volume until it comes to look like a three-dimensional object about to tear itself off the medium.
The shaped canvases idea is the natural consequence. […]

[…] Albeit similar to the research of the Minimal and Post-painterly currents across the Atlantic, Aricò’s shaped canvases appear wholly original, since the US certainty of structure and form is replaced by the ambiguity of one and the other. Indeed, they lie on the border between emotion and reason, colour and structure, two and three dimensions, between painting, object, architecture and space. […]
Ilaria Bernardi, À rebours, text in the catalog