Astrazione Analitica is a project dedicated to the European painting movement that, in the 1970s, reacted to the challenge posed by Conceptual Art and Arte Povera, restoring value to the pictorial discipline within the contemporary landscape of artistic languages. Rediscovered for over a decade now by critics, the public, and the market, the movement— which from the outset positioned itself as transnational, straddling Italy, Germany, and France— continues to be the object of new historiographical investigations and continues to reveal research perspectives that remain relevant and worthy of deeper exploration. Noël Dolla, Ulrich Erben, Claude Viallat, and Gianfranco Zappettini, who in the 1970s were among the main exponents of Analytical Painting, still remain today important figures in the panorama of international abstraction. Menhir Arte Contemporanea, always attentive to the expressions of the contemporary art scene, to historicized movements or those in the process of becoming so, began with an exhibition titled precisely Astrazione Analitica (curated by A. Rigoni, La Spezia, June 27–September 6, 2015) a journey through the historical and recent work of these four protagonists. The French artists Dolla and Viallat are two leading figures of Supports/Surfaces, the group that in Nice, between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, absorbed the suggestions of Nouveau Réalisme and Arte Povera in order to bring into painting the social revolution that, after May 1968, was already underway. In those same years in Germany and Italy, Erben and Zappettini were instead moving toward the overcoming of Concrete Art and Conceptual Art, assimilating their most innovative contributions—such as compositional rigor and the centrality of thought in the pictorial process—considering painting as a language, with its own grammar and syntax. The exhibition project of Menhir Arte Contemporanea foresees, in the coming months, solo shows dedicated to each of the four artists, starting with Ulrich Erben and continuing with Gianfranco Zappettini, Noël Dolla, and Claude Viallat, in a dialogue between past and present through the comparison of recent and historical works, an excursus and an overview of an international sensibility alive then as it is today.
From Alberto Rigoni’s text in the catalogue:
“The two lines of research of that movement qualify that experience of the 1970s as truly new, because it embraced the very demands of the immediately preceding currents that aimed at the destruction of painting itself—such as Arte Povera (see Dolla and Viallat and their interest in nature and matter) and Conceptual Art (see Erben and Zappettini and their focus on the mental process preceding the action). This is the reason for the title of today’s exhibition at the Menhir gallery, in which the unified name of the group Analytical Painting splits into the two nuances that characterized it (‘Painting’, more tied to the variety of color, gesture, and support, and ‘Analytical’, revealing a reflection on method and language), conceptually distinct attitudes and interests yet historically united, which still today reverberate in the more recent works of the four masters. That theoretical solidity, combined with the felicity of execution, has indeed allowed these artists to maintain a high level of production to this day, thanks to the conceptual coherence and the technical mastery they refined in their youth.”
Bologna