dArt International Magazine

by John Mendelsohn

New York has a rare opportunity to see the work of the Italian modernist Bice Lazzari (1900-1981). The Mark & The Measure, the title of the exhibition at kaufmann repetto, organized with Richard Saltoun Gallery, captures the essential elements of Lazzari’s art – an intimate touch and an intuitive sense of visual structure. Together they combine to create works of unusual delicacy and power, animated by a musical pulse and emotive overtones. Over time, Lazzari’s abstract work evolved from gestural paintings, to strongly material pieces, to rhythmic, minimalist statements.

Lazzari wrote, “In paintings, I love light, space, rigor, structure, synthesis … and a little poetry.” The work in this survey exhibition, spanning the last four decades of her career, displays all of these qualities, and a pervasive, personal sense of mystery. This feeling is conveyed in the title of Laura Cherubini’s essay, Bice Lazzari: The Inner Life of Signs. In her essay, Cherubini points to specific influences on the artist’s work, and to a “lucid and epiphanic condensation of memory” (quoting Marisa Vescovo), that her work embodies.

Among the memories that shaped Lazzari’s paintings are her years working in the applied arts of weaving, textiles, mosaics, and murals, collaborating with Italian architects and designers. This work liberated Lazzari from her early training in figurative painting, opening her to the possibilities of geometric design and abstraction. The creation of continuous visual fields and an awareness that art was one with architectural space would go on to inform her paintings. Particularly resonant of this period is Lazzari’s Untitled from 1949 (the titles are translated from the Italian), a minimalist grid in deep red and black tempera on paper.

Beginning in the 1950s, Lazzari was able to devote herself to painting, first to geometric abstraction and then to gestural works, such as Night Writing, a storm of agitated, slashing strokes. Collage 1, with its blocky, emphatic forms and raw texture seems informed by both the “matter painting” and angst of post-war Italy’s Informalism.

Lazzari was born in Venice in 1900, where she studied the violin as a child. She moved to Rome in 1935, where she lived for the next five decades. Music’s ongoing influence emerged after a period of crisis, in the new direction Lazzari embarked on in 1964. There is a sense of fugitive feeling embedded in the physical surfaces of these works, such as Testimony, an atmosphere of tonalities that emerge from the surface of tempera, glue, and sand on canvas.

Similarly, in the powerful Sequence 3, a series of seven dark lines recede in perspective, suspended in a field of striations, that itself hovers like a vignette in a dream. The effect is that of an existential declaration of both individual agency and enveloping impermanence.

From the late 1960s, until the end of her life, Lazzari’s work incorporated the structural, the musical, and the lightness of material form in works that are by turn spare and intense, minimal and maximal. Untitled from 1967, paradoxically dense and subtle, is a dark, minimally woven field with extremely fine lines of lighter weft, divided into three columns by two warp lines in red and white.

In Untitled (Q-435) from 1972-73, dark space is traversed by tonal bands, the lightest of which is demarcated by a sequence of light and bold backslashes and dashes, alternating with blocks of emptiness. It is unaccountably moving, like a message in transit, sent out in the night, with and without hope of being heard.

Acrylic no. 6 from 1975 is both like the score and the playing of a musical composition, whose notes are fine and finer lines in black and red, shivering with the slight vibrato of the artist’s hand. A strict sequence is established, and then interrupted by two small, surprising anomalies that resonate in a vast white silence.

As Bice Lazzari wrote, “everything that moves in space is measurement and poetry. Painting searches in signs and color for the rhythm of these two forces, aiding and noting their fusion.”

Bice Lazzari: The Mark & The Measure (Selected Works from 1939-1978): kaufmann repetto, 55 Walker St., New York – May 12-June 17, 2023

by Jonathan Goodman

Costas Picadas comes from Greece, having been brought up in a family of doctors. But, eschewing that way of life, he decided to become an artist and studied in Paris before moving to New York City, where he now lives and works. A few years ago, his paintings were messy affairs, being taken up with dense overlays of rounded globular forms, much like the cells you might see in a microscope. Often, too, scribbles would make their way across the picture plane to the white sides framing the composition. The results were energetic and entertaining, as if the painting had forgotten its own boundaries.

But quite recently, Picadas has become a bit more restrained. His current works make use of similar drop-like forms, but the overlay of skeins of line is mostly gone. In consequence, the artist has moved more closely to classically defined abstract expressionism, an idiom so powerful it still effectively supports current efforts in the genre.

The ab-ex movement was enabled to a good extent by the efforts of foreign-born artists, and so Picadas is working within a decades-long tradition, It no longer makes sense to characterize this work as evidencing the original cultural influences on the artist practicing the style, Instead, the vernacular has become thoroughly international. The efflorescences of Picadas’s paintings are understood at once as joining the efforts of previous artists in New York.

Yet there are differences, too. Remembering the medical background of Costas’s family, we can imagine his imagery as coming from pictures taken with a microscope’s magnification. The works are hardly compositions for doctors to study, but perhaps there is a trace of medical rigor to be found in the pictures. In the painting Biome 2 (2022), globules in white, with designs within them drawn in a very light gray, drift across the entire composition. They are painted on a grayish wall of bricks. In the lower part of the work, small splotches of black dot the areas between the globules accompanied by pale green, inchoate forms and even a single golden form. This piece surely looks like a slide of some foreign bacterium. The surface, which is busy, carries the interest, although we are unsure about a precise meaning beyond the dense arrangement of diverging shapes.. In Biomae 11 (2022), a black vertical column acts as the major support of the image, but light blue-gray lines, forming circles and rough, undefinable forms, cover the dark mass rising upward. Thinner lines adorn the sides of the column, whose brute force is softened by the embellishments.

In a separate but strikingly effective group of works, Picadas uses a computer process to generate imagery closely aligned with the body and with nature. The work is small and figurative, but exquisitely detailed in ways that emphasize not only the overall gestalt, but also the sharp details. Lungs (YEAR?), Costas posts a highly detailed, highly realistic vision of the organs of breath: a trachea moves down the composition to split into two pipes, one each going to the semi-oval shape of each lung. Covering the lungs are small black blotches that combine with a tree-like maze of slender stems, ostensibly to carry the oxygen to the rest of the body. The graphic immediacy of the image astonishes; the sharpness of detail feels microscopic. In another image, called Heart (YEAR?), the reddish-brown semi-oval shape of a human heart anchors the thin stalks bearing black blossoms that rise from the upper surface of the organ. Here anatomy meets the lyrical bent of nature, and both appear enhanced by the affiliation.

Picadas’s art reverses our expectations by merging the intuitions of the process, its justifications as an interpretation of what we see, with the much more stringent detailing of natural (or scientific) imaging. In his case, the merger makes sense in that he comes from a family whose vocation was scientific in nature. By softening his effects a bit, Picadas mkes it clear that the scientific methods contribute well to a view most effectively disposed toward painting, rather than to the rigors of the lab. Picadas uses his background well, but medicine never overtakes his pictorial intelligence. We can conclude that the painter’s merger, between cellular depiction and free-wheeling abstraction, consistently results in compelling art.

by Christopher Hart Chambers

Francesco  Igory Deiana’s  exhibition comprises three different mediums and several entirely disparate approaches to art making: drawings, paintings, and sculptures. The salient unifying feature is that all of the work is exquisitely well crafted. The paintings, which make up the bulk of the show, are rendered in latex and acrylic in solid bright colors, for hard edged abstractions with strong, simple graphics. Ribbons of color, some shiny, some matte, wriggle down and across the surfaces. There are emblematic wings that might be borrowed from a Bavarian crest and stylistic serifs flare off in the otherwise essentially symmetrical compositions. In the back area of the gallery one larger and one smaller painting face each other. These two portray folding screens adorned with various abstracted motifs.

The monochromatic graphite drawings are backed with smudgy cloud formations like shimmering or dappled light. Atop this parallel vertical straight lines run about an eighth of an inch apart, like piano strings, twinkling in and out of the gloaming hypnotically. They are poster sized vertical rectangles; hung in a grid four across and two high. The imagery is cut off midway in a crescent so that the way they are displayed one has to either bend down or be very tall to look at either row straight on which forces the viewer to experience them peripherally and swoon a bit with the illusionistic Op Art effect.

There are fewer sculptures: a couple of globes resembling balls of wool and a cast, pigmented resin human head. It is not clear what ties these pieces in thematically with the rest, but in its gestalt the display is entirely appealing and sensually gratifying.

Francesco Igory Deiana: CRAZY ANGEL at Ruttkowski;68, New York City from April 7, 2023 to May 13, 2023