The Arnulf Rainer da Poggiali exhibition in Florence
The works on display at the Galleria Poggiali, many of which unpublished, summarize the aesthetic and intellectual research of Arnulf Rainer, in whose poetics the chromatic force is a mirror and metaphor of the energy of life
An artist with an instinctive impetus, who has no qualms about “getting his hands dirty” – hence the evocative title of the exhibition – even painting with his fingers, Arnulf Rainer (Baden, 1929) is a rebel against conventions and labels, such as not to be classifiable in a very specific current. A little surrealist, a little informal, a little expressionist, a little conceptual, his work mainly told a creative effort which is an inner struggle to grasp knowledge, of reality as of themselves. Nature is the main subject of Rainer’s pictorial poetics, but represented in such a way as to appear as the “battlefield” of that emotional and intellectual travail that is existence, and which finds its sublimation in the constellations of the Nineties, in which the roar of stellar zones seems to explode.
PAINTING ACCORDING TO ARNULF RAINER
A dynamic painting, bordering on suffering, which gives rise to a visual and narrative path of great impact; works whose magnificence stands out also thanks to the white walls of the gallery and the sober elegance of the setting.
In extreme contrast to these canvases, a large cross almost completely black (Ohne Title, 1998) which, despite the color, offers a moment of stability and peace; a work with a contemplative, highly conceptual character, where the “chromatic chaos” is canceled out in the “non-color” par excellence and brings to mind the cathartic stellar explosion so dear to Italo Svevo.
I Niccolò Lucarelli