Hans-Ulrich Obrist: “The future came out of the past, then? Fragments of your own history - personal and national - nourished this new language?”Giosetta Fioroni: “Precisely”.
After participating in several editions of the Venice Biennale (1956, 1964, 1972, 1993, 1995, 2011), Giosetta Fioroni returns to Venice, thanks to a three-stage path which aims to highlight the modernity and the multiple facets of the art of the only female protagonist of the Pop Art associated with the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, in Rome. Among the few prominent women artists of the postwar period in Italy, her research still resonates today with modernity, intertwines with other contemporary expressive languages, and carries out an enduring influence on following generations, also at an international level. After the first stage at the Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m. in Bologna, it is now the turn of ACP - Palazzo Franchetti by Fondazione Calarota. On this occasion, the focus is not only on the renowned Argenti series - the iconic works from the Sixties and Seventies - but also on her connection with literature, deeply marked by her long-lasting relationship with Goffredo Parise, through a selection of artist’s books realized by Fioroni.
In the Italian art landscape of the second half of the XX century, Giosetta Fioroni occupies a singular position. Born in Rome in 1932, she is one of the protagonists of the so-called Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, the only woman, but her research has always crossed any univocal definition, freely moving between image, memory and narrative.
Alongside painting, which remains the most recognized point of her work, over time Fioroni has experienced a plurality of languages, including editorial practice. It is precisely in the interplay between word and image that a crucial aspect of her production takes shape: that of artists’ books and illustrations, intimate and experimental spaces where the visual gesture dialogues with the narrative and poetic dimension. Not by chance, Fioroni has repeatedly defined the written world as a real agent provocateur of images: a trigger capable of generating visions, activating the mark and orienting the construction of an imagery.
The exhibition in the library rooms of ACP - Palazzo Franchetti by Fondazione Calarota presents a significant selection of books created by Fioroni over the decades. These include emblematic titles such as Diario veneto, veneziano e lagunare e…, Ozio with Goffredo Parise, Fisionomie, Dossier Vado, as well as the works stemmed from her encounters with some of the voices of XX century Italian literature, such as the Venetian poet Andrea Zanzotto and the writer Guido Ceronetti. In these books, Fioroni’s mark does not only illustrate, but it also builds an autonomous visual presence which amplifies and transforms the text. One section of the library is devoted to forms of the book that extend beyond the paper support.
There are ceramic works realized at the Bottega Gatti, conceived as true three-dimensional books: structures that open up and unfold in space, housing within them poetic texts by Ceronetti, in dialogue with Fioroni’s visual intervention. In these works, the word does not accompany the image, but becomes an integral part of it and material presence. Alongside this production, the path also includes a selection of volumes by other important authors for whom Fioroni designed the covers, testifying to a further mode of relationship between art and literature. Among these, works by Giorgio Bassani, Antonia Susan Byatt, Alberto Moravia, where the artist’s intervention engages with the editorial format, condensing in an image the visual threshold of the text. The exhibition in the rooms of the library thus restores an essential dimension of Giosetta Fioroni’s research, where the book turns into a space of invention, memory and connection between arts.
Protagonist of the exhibition is also a selection of her iconic canvases from the Sixties: the Argenti series, which have had a strong influence on contemporary art and artists, testifying the modernity of Giosetta Fioroni’s artistic language. As she states in 1976: “Silver is memory, recovery, and the suspension of different times”. A decade earlier, in 1964, Giosetta Fioroni exhibited at the 32nd Venice Biennale, the edition marking the international success of Pop Art. However, differently from American artists, her painting stands out for a continuous introspective dimension and for a openly artisanal craftsmanship, exerted through the brush and far from the mechanic seriality of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen prints. Her works capture the instant of a gaze or an emotion, sourcing both from everyday life - often filtered through illustrated news magazines and chronicle - and from the learned reference from Renaissance masters, as well as from languages, stories and techniques of cinema. The renowned Argenti series dates back to the Sixties: images projected on the canvas or paper and painted with industrial varnish in aluminum tones with a reflective effect which makes the image emerge, almost fading in through the clouds of time, and which unmistakably characterizes her production until the late Seventies. These works, now considered emblematic, define an immediately recognizable lexicon where memory, conceived as an active space for reworking lived experiences and imagination, becomes a central element, as does the search for the construction of an identity that is not only personal, but also cultural. Indeed, when Hans-Ulrich Obrist asked her: “The future came out of the past, then? Fragments of your own history - personal and national - nourished this new language?” Giosetta Fioroni answered “Precisely”.