Reliefs and Lines
29 April – 2 July 2016
Spazio Testoni
via D’Azeglio 50, Bologna
www.spaziotestoni.it
The Italian artist Alberto Zilocchi (1931 – 1991) frequented in the 1950s the artistic avant-garde of Milan, where he met, inter alia Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni and exhibited with them. In the 1960s he attended as well circles of the north European artists, particularly the Düsseldorf group Zero. At this time he started to do his monochrome reliefs. In the 1980s he invented his “Lines”. Until his dead, Zilocchi’s works where shown in over 100 exhibitions, in Italy and especially in northern Europe. For the first time after 1991 the Spazio Testoni dedicates a solo show to his works, which have been enclosed during all this time at the family’s estate. The current exhibition is divided in three sections. There are the Reliefs, originating from the 1970s, the Lines and a documentation of his cooperation with other artists in form of books, posters and photos.
White reliefs
Alberto Zilocchi’s reliefs are monochromes which can be associated to constructivist research to create abstract artworks without being a reflexion of the existing world. Moreover they refer to artistic efforts in the 1950s and later to structure an image by paint application and shaped canvas. These interventions guided to monochrome images where the colour itself is the main actor in cooperation with light incidence and shadows, caused by the relief of the surface. The often used Italian expression for shaped canvas is “estroflessione”. In the context of Alberto Zilocchi’s works the translation as advances or projection in the sense of overhang might be more appropriate, since he worked with wood panels instead of canvas. His from the picture surface outstanding geometric forms are actually the reminiscences of the original plane. To make them visible he carved them precisely out and painted them with white acrylic colour.
The results are geometric designed panels. Sometimes there are only some diagonal or vertical arranged oblong rectangles. In other examples there are several square shaped overhangs, on first view without any logical order. Nevertheless the attentive observer will find a system in the arrangement.
Black lines
Comparable chaotic impressions are given by the quadratic Line images, but they are designed by complicated algorithms fed by numbers that are randomly determined via dice throwing. First Zilocchi created a logical made grid on the painting ground and calculated with these random numbers the points where his lines lie in between. The result is a complex structure, difficult to decipher.
In a second stage he enlarged details of the first structure, so it is easier to identify the combinations of lines. For the exhibition at the Kemi Art Museum (Kemi, Finland) in 1983 the artist went even another step further. He isolated a single structure of crossed lines and increased it to build it as a wooden sculpture on a pedestal. This original figure is still in Finland, but in the exhibition there is a reproduction, installed in a single room with a poster of the original and two of the line images. The light direction casts the sculptures shadow on the wall besides the pictures, so that the three stages of the artist’s lines are visible together.
The way to the exhibition
Even if Alberto Zilocchi participated in many exhibitions, he was never interested to commercialise his works. Only the artistic research was important to him. In consequence, many of his creations stayed enclosed at his domicile at the moment of his death. The family left the oeuvres in place and they were never shown again since. Maurizio de Palma, collector and art enthusiast rediscovered Alberto Zilocchi and started a research, which finally ended with contacting the family. After the study of the treasure in artworks and texts and long conversations with the heirs, it was decided that it was time for a new valorisation of the heritage. In a first place the Spazio Testoni showed some of Alberto Zilocchi’s works at the Bolognese art fair “Arte Fiera” in January 2016. This was the prelude for the current exhibition, where it is as well possible to discover besides the oeuvres some documents like exhibition posters, a project folder and several exhibition documents. Supplementary the gallery edited a commented catalogue for the exhibition.
Catalogue:
Alberto Zilocchi: Relievi e Linee
Spazio Testoni
Bologna, 2016
10 €