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In the large white box on the first floor Cardi Gallery, Kounellis’ works seem to emerge from the walls. The light-dark alternation is part of the effectiveness of the exhibition and the language of the materials is a continuous story from one painting to the next.
A selection from the productions of the central representative of Arte Povera, the pieces created in 1991 to which the artist is particularly attached. A series which however is not, seven pieces, seven metal panels crossed by charcoal ‘writings’ arranged in a line write an unknown and primitive, rock alphabet.
If he himself defines his works as paintings and claims for himself the profession of painter (a definition from which he has never distanced himself), it is evident that the material is his colour, the arrangement of the material is his style.
A replacement work
Kounellis’ work, since the 1960s and evidently in this exhibition, carries out a work of substitution that transforms pictorial art, removing it from patterns and tradition and delivering it to modernity through the use of everyday materials , materials available and indicative of the time.
An expressive revolution that he shares with other greats of his time (Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Jackson Pollock) and more contemporary than ever. Kounellis’ installations bring with them and propose a reflection on the human situation, in suffering and the weight of destiny. The density, the weight and the color and the ‘truth’ of the materials speak to the spectator directly, putting him in front of the transformations of the matter, delivering him to a sensorial, physical, real experience. In the nineties Kounellis found a new strength, after a period of disappointment and disenchantment linked to the submission of Arte Povera to commercial logic, he abandons the use of living animals and materials in transformation and rediscovers the intimate meaning of his art in a more meditative dimension and aware of dialogue with future generations and so we find it in this exhibition.
The beauty from sacrificed materials
The exhibition, like the work of the Italian-Greek painter, however, does not lack an explicit and comprehensible aesthetic statement, the beauty of the material and its versatility, the possibility of building beauty from sacrificed materials. The seven untitled works are part of a group of works which over the years, in a fragmented manner, have taken part in various exhibitions, always remaining the property of the artist and then of the Kounellis estate. Cardi’s exhibition choice, in collaboration with the ownership of the works, arranged without a predefined criterion, isolates and lights up the series (which is not) in an environment in which the spectator cannot fail to grasp its individual and dialoguing power at the same time .