MILAN GALLERIA 10 A.M. ART FROM 4 MARCH TO 30 APRIL 2021 “AND IT IS ALWAYS MUSIC. LUIGI VERONESI, GIOVANNI PIZZO, LUCIA DI LUCIANO” curated by Paolo Bolpagni

From 4 March to 30 April 2021, the 10 A.M. ART gallery in , in its venue in 5 Corso San Gottardo, is organising the show And it is always music. Luigi Veronesi, Giovanni Pizzo, Lucia Di Luciano. The curator, Paolo Bolpagni, has written:

The idea of juxtaposing works by three artists who, though from different generations and backgrounds (respectively the north, centre, and south of Italy), from the 1970s and 1980s conducted researches into the relationship between sound, form, and colour, developing an abstract language able to translate visually, even though with different premises, musical expressions.

Right from his youthful period, Luigi Veronesi, born in Milan in 1908, had important relationships with such composers as Riccardo Malipiero Jr (as well as with the critic Luigi Rognoni, among the greatest scholars of dodecaphony in Italy). After his experience of “abstract” films, made between 1940 and 1942, colouring by hand the cinematographic film with the aim of giving life to a “painting in movement” with a strong rhythmic-musical imprint, in the 1950s Veronesi began to work on the possibility of translating sounds into colours – and vice versa – on the basis of mathematical and scientific principles, according to an objective, but not extrinsic, correspondence. In 1968 this was to result in the transposition system through which, from 1970 onwards, there were created “chromatic visualisations” of music, which were to become a fundamental sector of the artist’s output in the final thirty years of his career. Also as a result of the consultancy of such friends as Vittorio Fellegara, teacher of composition at the conservatoire, Mario Cazzola, the bassoonist of the orchestra of the Scala theatre in Milan, and Luigi Rognoni himself, Veronesi developed a method that, even with obvious limits from the point of view of scientific coherence, allowed him to produce works of great fascination and quality. Furthermore, his ingenious “system” was undoubtedly efficient for musical analysis, highlighting the possibility of offering, through “chromatic visualisation”, an immediate and instantaneous understanding of the rhythmic structure of a piece even for those who do not know its grammar and language. In fact, we are dealing with a score compiled in an alternative notation with respect to the standard one, in which, in the place of the graphic marks of the pentagram, notes and pauses, coloured rectangles are used. In the show at the Galleria 10 A.M. ART there are present some of most important series made by Veronesi, in other words those of Contrapunctus II in four voices in D minor from Die Kunst der Fuge BWV 1080 by Johann Sebastian Bach (a series of eleven pieces dating from 1970), of the 2ème sarabande by Erik Satie (seven elements, 1982-1983), and the poem for piano Vers la flamme op. 72 by Alexander Scriabin (series of fourteen collages on cardboard, 1983- 1985). Also on show are some studies that Veronesi made between 1986 and 1970 in order to synthesise the criteria used for the graphical result of the values and pauses, with tables of the correspondences between musical high notes and chromatic range, and between the luminosity and saturation of the tones in relation to sound frequencies. And finally, dating from a period between 1986 and 1994, is the incomplete attempt to transpose bars number 23 to 32 from the first movement of the Concerto for bassoon and orchestra in A minor RV.498 by Antonio Vivaldi in the transcription for bassoon and piano by Karl Heinz Fuessl.

Unexpectedly similar from a formal aspect to the visualisations of Veronesi, and quite separate from the contemporary works by the Swiss Jakob Weder (1906-1990) and the American Jack Ox (1948) who undertook researches independent of, and unknown to, each other, are many of the Sign-Gestalt by Giovanni Pizzo (Veroli, Frosinone, 1934) and the Cromo strutture and Variazioni cromatiche of Lucia Di Luciano (Syracuse, 1933); some of these are to be seen in the Galleria 10 A.M. ART show, some of them remarkable examples dating from 1972 to 1990, in a juxtaposition that is new and in many ways surprising. Founders and exponents first of the Gruppo 63 and then of the Operativo R, the two artists, linked by an association that is both professional and sentimental, having superseded the phase of the exclusive use of black and white, permanently reintroduced colour in their painting at the beginning of the 1970s. For Giovanni Pizzo the Sign-Gestalt expression alluded to the notion of a “form-sign” used as a primary element of a visual alphabet expressed according to the rhythmic-musical progressions of geometric modules, which in some cases – I am thinking in particular of Sign-Gestalt n. 156, 1976, Sign-Gestalt n. 197, 1977, Sign-Gestalt E64, 1981, and Sign-Gestalt E92, 1982 – show evident affinities with the visualisations of Luigi Veronesi. The same can be said of numerous works by Lucia Di Luciano: for example, Cromo struttura, 1978, and Articolazione strutturale discontinua, 1980, based on rectangular modules that “run” horizontally from left to right on superimposed zones, in the same manner as a musical score of coloured forms constructed with pictorial rather than notational procedures. It should also be remembered that music, in the life and career of Giovanni Pizzo and Lucia Di Luciano, has never been an extraneous or secondary element. It is not very well known, but both, already in the 1960s, had a close relationship with the Venetian composer Pietro Grossi, the founder of the phonology studio in Florence and a pioneer in Italy of the use of electronics in music: owing to him are acoustic “voicings” and installations made ad hoc for shows by the two artists. On at least one occasion, this, so to say, synaesthetic manner was put into play by Pizzo and Di Luciano using traces of Iannis Xenakis, at the time – I am still speaking of the 1960s – active in the studio of Le Corbusier, whose mathematical concepts applied to architecture were of great importance to the development of the musical language, still little known in Italy, that was to make famous the French-Greek Xenakis. Even later on the two artists were in contact with composers and, in general, they paid uncommon – and fairly precocious and divinatory - attention to the permutations of sound typical of the Minimalists (the most famous practitioner of which is Philip Glass) and the adoption of the golden mean and the Fibonacci series in the 1970s by many American composers. To mention other examples of nearness to the universe of music, it is enough to recall that Lucia Di Luciano dedicated a painting to Salvatore Sciarrino, inspired by a piece by him heard on the radio, and furthermore she has cooperated more than once with Mauro Bagella, a pupil of Domenico Guaccero, the co-founder of the Associazione Nuova Consonanza in Rome, while in the 1990s Giovanni Pizzo created a series of works for the debut in Italy, in Villa Medici in Rome, of Four Walls by John Cage, the first work, dating from 1944, in which was introduced the “long silence”, earlier than the famous 4’33”. Both also worked with the composer Vittorio Gelmetti.

The presence of music within their own artistic production is, then, shown to be a distinctive trait that is common to Luigi Veronesi, Giovanni Pizzo, and Lucia Di Luciano. This show at the Galleria 10 A.M. ART, Milan, allows the opening up of a horizon for new exploration of an aspect that is not, perhaps, considered enough.

Biographical notes

Luigi Veronesi was born in Milan in 1908. He enrolled at the technical institute, followed a course for textile designers, and studied painting under the guidance of Carmelo Violante. As a very young man he frequented the artists centred around the Galleria Il Milione where, at just seventeen, he exhibited for the first time works influenced by Sironi and Modigliani. Having embraced abstraction, in 1934 he became part of the Abstraction-Création group. In this period, fundamental to him were his meetings with , László Moholy-Nagy, Max Bill, and Jean Tschichold, who enabled him to assimilate the lessons of the and get to know the works of Malevich, El Lissitzky, and Rodchenko. In the meantime, he was working with the “Campo Grafico” magazine. He also collaborated with “Casabella” and “Ferrania” and, after the war, with “AZ”. He undertook many experiments in the period of the 1930s and 1940s, during which he developed a personal geometric-constructivist abstraction, and was receptive to various expressive areas: painting, photography, etching, cinema, set design etc. He also became interested in music: in 1936 he created the famous 14 variazioni di un tema pittorico, with collage and ink on paper and now in the collection of MART, Rovereto. They were to be reproduced in a book three years later, together with 14 variazioni di un tema musicale, composed in 1938 by Riccardo Malipiero Jr, inspired by the Veronesi work. In 1939 this series of works was then exhibited in a solo show held at the Galerie Équipe, Paris. In 1947 he became part of the La Bussola photographic group, signing its programmatic manifesto; in 1948, instead, he became part of M.A.C. (Movimento Arte Concreta). In the 1950s and 1960s Veronesi received his first important recognitions (prizes, participation in the Venice Biennales and those of Sao Paolo, Brazil, solo shows in Italy and abroad) and he underwent a moment of uneasy receptiveness to some aspects of the Informel movement, which he then superseded and returned to a lyrical-constructivist sharp geometry. He also began his teaching career at the (where he “inherited” the chromatology course introduced by Mario Ballocco), and then at the Nuova Accademia in Milan. In the 1980s and 1990s he added to his renewed interest in photography and cinema operations similar to the field of the applied arts, with frescoes, plans for piazzas, and graphic interventions outside. He died on 25 February 1998 in Milan. (p. b.)

Giovanni Pizzo was born in Veroli, Frosinone, in 1934, and Lucia Di Luciano in Syracuse in 1933. Both went to Rome: he graduated in architecture in 1955 and she went to the academy of fine arts where they met. They married in 1959. In 1963, together with Francesco Guerrieri and Lia Drei, they founded the Gruppo 63 which, in the area of kinetic-programmatic art, had a decidedly rationalistic approach, with a logical- mathematical basis, that aimed at the definition of geometric modules that would allow art to join up with architecture and industrial design. This association of four lasted only a short time due to programmatic differences. Already in 1964 Giovanni Pizzo and Lucia Di Luciano started up the Operativo R, involving in it Carlo Carchietti, Franco Di Vito, and Mario Rulli. The works they produced in that period started from an analysis of visual processes with a gestalt matrix. The component of scientific research cohabited with a technique of great qualitative care. A reading of texts by Bertrand Russell on mathematical logic on the one hand, and the will to follow rigorous geometric rules on the other, led to the development of an “image- mark” where the colour, inasmuch as a potentially emotive and subjective factor, was banned. The supports were for the most part Masonite or at least panels, the dimensions of which referred back to a relationship to the golden mean. In the works of Di Luciano there was often determined an effect of the superimposition of grids, which conferred on the image an evident multidimensionality. The compositions by Pizzo have in their titles the prefix Sign-Gestalt, which alludes to the very notion of “mark-form”: a kind of primary element of a basic alphabet, alternately articulated according to rhythmic progressions and structures of geometric modules. The two artists exploit the combinatory of such procedures that, at times, also reveal clear musical implications. There was then to come for Lucia Di Luciano and Giovanni Pizzo a return to colour: not in the systematic way of the 1960s but with the gradual introduction of primary tones. This was not to be a betrayal of their original assumptions but a deepening of an inquiry into optical perception, one that Di Luciano was to undertake, for example, in her Gradienti series, works overflowing with imaginative verve united to scientific rigour; and Pizzo, in his so-called “geometric-rational” phase, during which he was to discover the possibilities of Albert H. Munsell’s Atlas to enrich his chromatic analysis. The researches of both still continue. (p. b.)

“AND IT IS ALWAYS MUSIC. LUIGI VERONESI, GIOVANNI PIZZO, LUCIA DI LUCIANO”

Milan, Galleria 10 A.M. ART (Corso San Gottardo, 5) 4 March - 30 April 2021

Opening: Thursday 4 March 2021 at 5 p.m.

Opening hours: from Tuesday to Friday, from 10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m., and from 2.30 p.m. to 6 p.m. On other days by appointment only

Free entry

Information: tel. + 39 02.92889164; [email protected]; www.10amart.it