| CARLO BATTAGLIA | browse the Magazine | |
| pittura 1969 – 1979 | ||
| curated by MARCO MENEGUZZO | ||
| 17 may – 19 july 2019 |
“Throughout his artistic career, Carlo Battaglia fought to avoid being considered an avant-garde artist. But people didn’t always believe him, so, for almost the whole of the 1970s, he found himself representing that trend today identifying itself as ‘Analytical Painting’, which at the time was also called ‘New Painting’ or ‘Painting Painting’ […]. But he must have appeared a heterodox presence next to the theoretical diktats of that analyticity; indeed, he must have looked like ‘another’ possibility […].”
Il Ponte gallery is rounding off its exhibition season – before the summer break – with a solo exhibition devoted to the painting of Carlo Battaglia, presenting fifteen large works from 1969 to 1979.
His work from this decade nevertheless represents the absolute climax of “New Painting”, underscoring the distinctive characteristic of those Italian artists who found themselves in this field at the time. Indeed, while each artist developed their own line, that their work originated from the great Italian painting tradition is evident.
“His representation is not imitation: the second term is negative, the first instead constitutes the great tradition of painting […]. In painting, to represent a world… is to create a world with the tools available to painting, not to imitate it: it is what he defined as a ‘parallel image’, namely an equivalent of the sensation, obtained using the linguistic and disciplinary tools that each one of us has chosen, yes in order to communicate, but first of all to live […]. All of his painting is always and only aimed at creating the world in which he felt immersed.”
(The two quotations are taken from the text by Marco Meneguzzo in Carlo Battaglia. Catalogo ragionato, edited by Marco Menguzzo and Simone Pallotta, Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2014.)
BEFORE A PICTURE BY CARLO BATTAGLIA
Undefinable colour, like the changing surface of the sea.
Colour as the sum of colours, even when it looks the bluest of blues.
Dizzy like the field of colour into which you can fall.
The field of colour: abstraction from reality.
The field of colour: abstraction from the idea.
The reality of colour like human reality: changing.
The picture: the fragment of continuing becoming.
The picture: the utopia of stopping the unstoppable.
Sea as text and pretext of the painting.
Painting as text and pretext of the sea.
Beyond the surface of the sea, the abyss of colour.
Signs on the surface, like an endless Morse code of the sea.
Painting: looking, contemplating, remembering.
Painting: being like the sea.
The constant pendulum of the arm on the paper, simulation of infinity.
Marco Meneguzzo
