Casey Kaplan
ARTSEEN | October 2026
Giorgio Griffa: Paths in the Forest
By Michael Corris
Paths in the Forest is an exhilarating survey spanning nearly six decades of nuanced and complex paintings by Italian artist Giorgio Griffa. Curated by Robert Wiesenberger and mounted at the Clark Art Institute, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to experience the most important cycles of work in Griffa’s ethically-informed aesthetic project. Apart from the lush hues of the effervescent works on display, the most striking aspect of the selection on view here is the optimism they impart to the artist’s lucid argument for disaffirmative art.
Griffa’s essay, “On Nondomination,” is an urgent critique of the conventions that shape our experience of visual art and our understanding of an artist’s moral obligations.1 Mainly couching his argument in aesthetic terms, Griffa recounts the various strategies used to achieve his ideal of nondomination in painting: escape from aesthetic injunctions and popular expectations regarding the nature of art and the relationship between the artist, their work, and the world. Since Griffa’s definition of domination includes the conventions and affordances of language, kinship, power, and technology, his general approach has been to make paintings that fail to signify. Typically this means (according to the conventional sense of the word) that they do not refer to an object or communicate a state of affairs external to material composition of the work itself.
For further reading, please visit The Brooklyn Rail website.