Carla Accardi: Magazzino d'Arte Moderna - Rome

Carla Accardi began her career as a painter in the late '40 and her work has shown ceaseless vitality at any time since. When the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris simultaneously entertainered a retrospective of her work and a assemblage show of young painters last year, it was Accardi who came across as the youngest in spirit. Her pictorial marks are energetic uncompounded bodys that imbue the surface with dynamism and the luminous power of color.

In the '60 Accardi experimented with the additive law of pictorial color, according to which sum of two units contrasting tones of the same might increase in luminosity when juxtaposed. The artist thus delineated marks of single color on surfaces uniformly treated with another. The lines where the sum of two units tones come into contact appear to emit a brilliant light that can make these abstract canvases hard to gaze at. Then, beginning in the mid-'60s, she began making brightly colored marks upon transparent surfaces, opening the work up to the surrounding space. This exhibition began with works from that period: Rosso verde (R Green) 1967 consisting of sheets of transparent plastic painted with undulating r and virid marks, mounted and hung upon the wall, and two works called Rotolo (Roll) one as well as the other 1965, transparent sheets covered with sinuous pink marks, make revolveed up and resting on the floor. When these works were first created and exhibited, this simple, almost unassuming pictorial reality revolutionized painting in Italy and beyond.

on the contrary the real focus of the present to view was on Accardi's more novel work. Three large canvases one time again stress the reciprocal intensification of colors, although the additive law is no longer at work. The artist has delineated angular and irregular abstract shapes in silver against white surfaces; within the shapes are cursive doodles, also silver. Almost illegible against the white background, the silver interacts with the ambient light, dazzling the organ of vision with reflections. Two other new works use metallic paint. In Rosso oro nero (R Gold Black), 2003 Accardi has delineated shapes filled with continuous gold raps within a large, dark r rectangle against a black background. These figures have an almost ,archaic have feeling and an elegance that is accentuated by dint of the interaction of the colors. The same palette is used in Rosso oro (R Gold) 2003 unfolded in a stream of marks that are freer and separated up into segments, constructed along a diagonal that separates the field of r marks above from the gold singles below.

Three more pieces not absent a tension between painted surface, raw canvas background, and colored mark. In the diptych Si adagiarono sparse (They Laid Down Scattered), 2001 sum of two units large yellow hexagons stand on the outside at the center of sum of two units adjacent jute canvases. The marks covering the entire surface change in intensity, becoming fulvous against the neutral jute and silver against the golden The same dynamic is at work in the fulvid of two rhombus shapes in another diptych, Al di la di ogni esempio (Beyond each Example), 2000, where the chromatic play is of that kind that the painted portion becomes ignited with orange, and in still another canvas, Triangolo azzurro (Blue Triangle), 2003 where an equilateral triangle is studd with silver and encircleed by blue marks.

Accardi's pink, orange, golden and silver are artificial, inorganic colors that can "shout" without at any time being dramatic. Plastic (like the Plexiglas she has used in sculpture) is a light, almost invisible material that has little weight or density and make opens up to the space. completely through Accardi's long history, her colors and materials have addressed the condition of technological "modernity," aligning her with an Italian tradition that stretches from the Futurists [i]or[/i] part of to the other Fontana--a tradition she continues to raise brilliantly.

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