Oscar Piattella
I MURI
Curated by Aldo Iori and Alberto Mazzacchera
Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio – Cappella di Santa Maria dei Bulgari, Bologna
6 February – 8 March 2025
As part of ART CITY Bologna 2025 on the occasion of Arte Fiera
Exhibition promoted by Archivio Oscar Piattella
Under the patronage of do ut do
In collaboration with Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio
Sponsors Illumia, Inveco, PwC and Ti Style iT
In the centrally located and prestigious Cappella di Santa Maria dei Bulgari of the Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna, from 6 February to 8 March 2025, the first and most significant section of the multi-venue retrospective exhibition dedicated to Oscar Piattella (Pesaro, 1932 – Urbino, 2023), curated by Aldo Iori and Alberto Mazzacchera, opens to the public.
The exhibition is promoted by the Archivio Oscar Piattella under the patronage of do ut do, in collaboration with the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, with Illumia, Inveco, PwC and Ti Style iT as sponsors.
With Oscar Piattella. I muri, presented to the public (opening 5 February, at 16:00), are eight large-format works belonging to the cycle of the same name (1958 – 1986), which has a particular connection with the ART CITY 2025 Special Program entitled Le porte della città.
The exhibition at Bologna’s Archiginnasio is the first of three exhibition events conceived to highlight the work of the Pesaro artist and scheduled during the week of ART CITY Bologna and Arte Fiera. On Saturday 8 February, the exhibitions Oscar Piattella. I segni del cosmo at the PwC Italia premises in via Carlo Farini 12 (18:00, invitation only) and Oscar Piattella. Magnetismo architetturale at Galleria Stefano Forni, piazza Cavour 2 (22:30, free admission), will also open.
The wall, through its different manifestations, marks almost uninterruptedly the entire artistic production of Oscar Piattella. The magnetic force of the wall in Piattella’s painting is not, however, sufficient to explain such an attachment, verging on an apparent obsession. Nor could it be for a cultivated and experimental painter such as Piattella, constantly poised between the need to remain rooted in recognisability and an absolute nomadism across the expanses of invention. The spirit of research in Piattella is, and remains, central, at any cost.
His work is the result of constant research, never intermittent, always profound and authentic. Undoubtedly, that “geometric phrasing” (as he himself defined it), which together with light is a central element of his painting and becomes an absolute protagonist in his late production of the second Millennium through I segni del cosmo, was for Piattella the means of marking a difference, of establishing a distance from Art Informel painting and from painterly gesture which, even when it appears, remains subject in his paintings to a rigorous, carefully conceived overall vision.
For this reason, Piattella’s material painting cannot be aligned with the path traced and suggested to many artists by Nicolas De Staël (1914 – 1955), since in Piattella the articulation of surfaces remains anchored to a powerful architectural fulcrum upon which his entire production is built. Nor are resonances with the painting of Jean Dubuffet (1901 – 1985) absent; these, however, are limited to the use of non-traditional materials and to an unconventional way of making painting, although in Piattella it is always controlled by a precise compositional vision. Drawing remains an essential stage in Piattella’s creative genesis.
This emerges, perhaps initially in a more instinctive than conceptual manner, from the 1950s onwards, when the artist began to produce a series of important, fully resolved works bearing the suggestions of terracotta surfaces. In those same years Piattella shared, at two different times, a studio in Pesaro with Nanni Valentini (1932-1985) and Giuliano Vangi (1931-2024), who affectionately called him “my pupil”. There was also his brief but intense stay in Paris in the aftermath of the Second World War, where the “Muri di Parigi” are works that plainly reverberate with the material and ideological dramas of the time. The cultural and historical references of Piattella’s Walls, a theme he began to investigate in the mid-1950s, are nevertheless broad and are not confined to defensive walls, whose history is inextricably intertwined with that of humanity, at least until the First World War, when technological developments applied to weapons and means of warfare changed the scenario. Political walls, those raised against freedom, had a powerful impact on the cultural context of the twentieth century; central among them is the Wall par excellence: the Berlin Wall. It is a concept and an idea to be understood in a general, emblematic sense, which the artist would explore through all its exemplary and historical meanings.
Through a skilful use of matter and the modulation of light, through that refined “geometric phrasing”, Piattella leads the viewer into an unmistakably inner dimension in which the initial passage through the wall, together with its perceptual persistence through the grid-like articulation, opens within the individual consciousness pathways marked by numerous milestones, like so many fragments of memory.
His passion for painting, practised since he was a boy, accompanied Oscar Piattella throughout his life. In the early 1950s Painting had knocked at his door. Two young teachers, his contemporaries and later friends, came to board in the large family home in Pesaro; they would become the well-known artists Giuliano Vangi and Loreno Sguanci (1931-2011).
In the post-war period, a group of artists emerged and took shape in Pesaro, engaged in dialogue with one another and often linked by friendships as well as professional relationships. This group played a role in cultivating the city’s cultural field and transforming it into a point of reference for a wider territory.
The transformation of his language, which Piattella developed rapidly and with great assurance, took place, not by chance, precisely during the years of his youth in Pesaro. Here he would establish solid and lasting relationships with Bruno Baratti, Renato Bertini, Bruno Bruni, Sandro Gallucci, Loreno Sguanci, Nanni Valentini and Giuliano Vangi. Pesaro also bore the formidable imprint of Arnaldo and his brother Giò Pomodoro, whom Piattella frequented in Milan together with Walter Valentini. While Pesaro was emerging as a beacon for contemporary art in the Marche, the surrounding hills hosted the important Arte Povera experiences that coalesced around Pier Paolo Calzolari, while in Cagli, in the shadow of the Apennines, the sculptor Eliseo Mattiacci was developing; after his experiences and successes in Rome and internationally, he would ultimately choose Pesaro.
For Piattella, therefore, the relationships begun when people still walked among the ruins of the war in Pesaro would help consolidate those talents that demanded mental spaces and stimulating exchanges. His initially figurative painting, centred on psychologically well-defined portraits, gave way, by the mid-1950s, to a new way of feeling. The painting Case in periferia, exhibited in 1955 at the VII Quadriennale di Roma, bears witness to early intuitions that within a short time would lead him to the formidable theme of the wall, which in the space of just a few years underwent a rapid development, leading to the mature series exhibited in 1958 at Galleria l’Ariete in Milan with an authoritative critical introduction by Franco Russoli.
In 1957 in Paris, Piattella was able to engage directly with European Art Informel and with new research in abstraction by French and Catalan artists. The suggestion of old Parisian buildings, with walls saturated with the horrors of war, led him to new considerations on pictorial space and the surface, which in this way was enriched with new colours and proliferations of signs.
In 1958 he met Franco Russoli, then director of the Pinacoteca di Brera and an authoritative figure in contemporary art criticism, who appreciated some of his works in the Milan studio of his close friend Nanni Valentini. In Milan, Piattella came into contact with an artistic milieu of strongly international character and became friends with Dorazio, Castellani, Cascella, Nigro, Fontana, Tancredi, Sottsass, the photographer Ugo Mulas and other figures in the European art world. In particular, he regularly associated with Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro, Paolo Schiavocampo, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Albert Diatò, Claudio Olivieri and Walter Valentini. His exchanges with artists, writers, poets (including, for example, his friends Yves Bonnefoy and Berand Noël), and intellectuals would remain a constant throughout Piattella’s journey towards knowledge. He was invited to international exhibitions and exhibited in major Italian and international galleries, while his works entered prestigious public and private collections. Over the years, his intensive research led his painting to receive widespread recognition both from the most authoritative critics and from a broad international public.
There were numerous major retrospective exhibitions, particularly in recent years, in institutional venues in Italy and abroad. From the mid-1970s he also became interested in printmaking and in the production of artists’ books, both in multiple editions and as unique works.
PwC
At the PwC premises in the former Banco di Napoli (via Carlo Farini, 12), the exhibition Oscar Piattella. I segni del cosmo focuses on the artist’s latest production (2015-2020), inspired by the theme of the cosmos and its elements. Three canvases from the wall works of 1958-60 (the unifying element of the three exhibition venues) will be displayed in PwC’s three windows, while a monitor will show the eight works from the Segni del cosmo cycle (2015-2020) exhibited in the historic double-height interior hall of the former Banco di Napoli.
The works displayed in the interior hall belong to the artist’s latest renewed phase, in which Piattella was able to find a fresh new source of creativity by returning in his thoughts to the examples of Urbino’s mathematical Renaissance.
Drawing, which had already supported him in several earlier pictorial cycles, became central from 2015 onwards. The rigour with which he planned each work down to the smallest detail, his recourse to mathematics and the emergence of “geometric phrasing” all loosen and disappear as colour is introduced onto the panel. What guides him is a masterful command of technique and his ability to further develop and refine formal balance and chromatic harmony.
Thus the latest works reach full maturity, with continual new calibrations and lightening of the calculated initial scheme, always with several radiating points present together, opening onto spaces of the mind. That hypnotic interplay of points, lines, squares, rhombi and waves in harmonious chromatic alternation conceals rigorous, demanding and unremitting work. Meticulous work that masterfully fades at the edges into a non-finito possessing the power to evoke the infinite universe.
The more one stands with an unencumbered eye before the works of Piattella’s latest production, the stronger the sensation of entering a borderland, a fertile and unexplored liminal space of painting. An authentic form of painting, capable of stirring emotion.
Information and opening hours: www.archiviopiattella.it
Galleria Stefano Forni
At Galleria Stefano Forni (piazza Cavour, 2), the retrospective exhibition Oscar Piattella. Magnetismo architetturale is presented. The selection of 14 works on display (1957-2012) focuses on different cycles of walls, on the centrality of drawing, and on works that were always carefully planned and marked by the well-rhythmed articulation of their surfaces.
Alongside the historic works of 1957-59 are the walls that the artist constructed using quadrangular sections of fabric (1990-91) recovered from the covers of old discarded mattresses from military barracks.
For Alberto Mazzacchera, “the question of the wall, a theme of harrowing centrality in the twentieth century, is expressed through different registers, tangible expressions of the multiple phases of research that unfolded and that Piattella developed along two fundamental and distinct trajectories. On the one hand, it takes its cue from fragments of the man-made world, evoking their presence through absence in order to lead the viewer before political walls; and what appears to be a kind of obsession does not, in fact, escape the projections of the long and unsettling shadow of the walls raised by human beings against freedom, which long afflicted the peoples of twentieth-century Europe. On the other hand, Piattella’s wall is also a gateway to the deeper layers of the mind, a diaphragm to be crossed towards a boundless inner universe”.
At first glance, these works, exhibited at Galleria Stefano Forni, might seem to bear traces of the work of Alberto Burri (1915-1995) from nearby Città di Castello. Yet this is only a superficial impression, since Burri manipulates matter with extraordinary effectiveness through fire, taking it to the verge of dissolution, whereas Piattella uses heat through heated plates in an elaborate and carefully calibrated search for infinite gradations of colour.
Works from 1991 are also exhibited, representing that part of Piattella’s artistic production which, after the blue and dark-blue gauzes of the late 1980s, found in pieces of denim a fertile expressive material, and in variations of blue its palette.
These masterfully constructed works by Piattella prompted Yves Bonnefoy, the great French poet and art critic, to write specifically in 2002 that “then there is blue as when one sees it becoming intense, hollowing out in the summer sky, an absolute that draws the spirit into the non-visible, the non-thinkable: this vertiginous silence of falling into the sky, of falling endlessly into the blue of the sky, which children are capable of, and adults remember”.
A few years earlier, Oscar Piattella, reflecting in a book devoted to the research of Azzurro Blu Celeste (1999), observed: “if we distilled all the seas of the world, not a trace of their blue would remain”; useless would be “our silk nets” cast onto the seabed, until one realised “that a little of that ‘matter’ is there, fused with the colour of our blood, as in a dream, like the dream of that same ‘matter’”. A matter which in Piattella, skilfully sublimated by light, is capable of stirring the unconscious and opening up new mental horizons.
Massimo Cacciari therefore reads him perceptively when he writes that in Piattella’s works “what appears is nothing but the shattering of inner Light; colours are nothing but the timbre that Light assumes as it illuminates the ‘landscape of the soul’”.
Information and opening hours: arte@galleriastefanoforni.com | www.galleriastefanoforni.com
Digital catalogues from previous exhibitions:
https://staging.archiviopiattella.it/mostre/cataloghi-sfogliabili/
INFO
Oscar Piattella
I MURI
Curated by
Aldo Iori and Alberto Mazzacchera
Exhibition promoted by
Under the patronage of
In collaboration with
As part of
Sponsors
Technical partner
Exhibition venue
Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio – Cappella di Santa Maria dei Bulgari
piazza Luigi Galvani 1, Bologna
Exhibition dates
6 February – 8 March 2025
Opening
Wednesday 5 February, 16 – 19
Opening hours during ART CITY Bologna 2025
Thursday 6 and Friday 7 February: 11 – 13 / 15 – 19
Saturday 8 February: 11 – 13 / 15 – 18 / 20 – 24
Sunday 9 February: closed
Opening hours after ART CITY Bologna 2025
Monday – Saturday: 11 – 13 / 15 – 18
Closed: Sunday
Free admission
General information
www.archiginnasio.it
www.archiviopiattella.it
Exhibition press office
Sara Zolla | press@sarazolla.com | Tel. 346 8457982