Casey Kaplan
Goings on About Town
Review: Giorgio Griffa
January 2018
This exhilarating show brings to light abstract paintings from the nineteen-eighties, when the Italian artist, who is now eighty-one, began straying from the lushly minimalist work he was making to follow his passion for the chromatic flair of Roman frescoes and Henri Matisse. The canvases hang unstretched on the wall, sporting grids of creases, evidence of having been folded in storage for decades—the works haven’t been seen since Griffa made them. The color is exuberant but the approach is restrained, allowing the unpainted space on each canvas to play a compositional role. Big blue loops trailing across the surface of “Tre Arabeschi” suggest an archangel’s handwriting exercise; horizontal bands of pink, peach, yellow, and salmon below vertical stripes of violet and aqua in “Campo e Segno” will banish dark thoughts, however briefly.