Franco Guerzoni challenges the limits of 'Outside the Painting'

More than fifty years after his first solo exhibition at Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna, Franco Guerzoni returns with Fuori dal dipinto (Outside the Painting), an exhibition that once again focuses on the limits and possibilities of painting. Born in Modena in 1948, Guerzoni is one of the most original figures on the Italian art scene, known for having combined photography and painting from his earliest days in a dialogue with both archaeology and the traces left by time on surfaces. His research has always been characterized by experimentation, through which he has produced works suspended between image and ruin, matter and erasure.

Since the 1970s, the artist has found the wall a favored subject; for him, the wall is a simple and shifting surface, a palimpsest of traces, a place where time settles and fades. That archaeological gaze on the everyday—born in part from a dialogue with his friend Luigi Ghirri and his photographic practice—has become, over the years, the basis for a painting that engages with the passage of time rather than the image itself.

In this new solo exhibition—opening today from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM at Via Val d'Aposa 4/a—the large panel on the left wall of the space, titled Intravedere, appears as a living organism, open and porous, allowing fragments and shards to "sprout" and arrange themselves along the walls. The tension between the painting and its surroundings becomes evident: it is not just a centrifugal expansion, but also a return motion, almost as if the fragments themselves yearn to re-enter the canvas that generated them. The work thus becomes a field of forces, where inside and outside blur and painting reveals its fragile nature.

The title, Fuori dal dipinto, emphasizes this very dialectic. Guerzoni's painting should not be understood as a finished image, but as a process that transcends the canvas to transform itself into space, into architecture. Each painted surface is conceived as a book to be leafed through, made of pages.

Overlapping, erasures, reappearances. It's no coincidence that a selection of the artist's books will be presented in the exhibition Franco Guerzoni. Secret Pages, held from September 26th to 28th at MAMbo, during Books, the Bologna art book festival.

In these books, as in the paintings and the rips, we find the same need to interrogate sign and time, as well as to transform the medium into a territory first traversed, then inhabited, and finally consumed. The solo exhibition at Galleria Studio G7 is accompanied by Frammenti, asincronie, appunti by Andrea Viliani, a different contribution of pauses, questions, and reflections always on the subject of time.

Manuela Valentini