12 Apr Achille Bonito Oliva

(from the presentation of the personal exhibition “L’Ordine Instabile”, Aosta, Tour Fromage, May-June 1998)

With Ferruccio Gard the dream of style dwells in his works, interfused naturally by dynamism, which does not however, mear simple abstraction but also the fascination of essentially at the extreme verge of a complex and modern philosophy. Because the rigours of technique and harmony always involve an essentiality that horders on stylisation an effect of technological production. He creates formal machines that contain within themselves the idea of construction and of joining a complexity that can always be assembled and disassembled before one’s eyes.
The paintings and drawings too are constructed with a sense of volume that manages to combine both the principles of virtual dynamism and that of an initial stasis. The forms are drawn and painted with a density and a strong and emphatic chromatic gusto that are able to render the sense of artifice of the urban scene.
The figures and objects are marked by vitality, obtained by the use of curved lines. A volumetric consistency appears to contradict the principal of speed that discomposes the bodies and renders them abstract.
At the same time the image always maintains an oneiric valence, the fruit of a montage of novel situations and un usual combinations. It has it basis in the appearance of a movement that articulacts space in such a way as to bring the oblects together by sheer on accleration, but without making them take to flight against the law of gravity.
… However, everything moves in a circle following lines of flow that envelop the composition and make in the field of a system of mobile relations according to the rules of an eternal motor that appears to lose its mechanical yearnings and to take on the peaceful cadence of philosophical vision that goes beyond even modernity. We thus reach an abstraction of forms that do not look towards kinetic iconography but to a sort of neoplatonic universe where pure forms in their concrete abstractness confront one another in the perfection of an immobility that comprehends every possible movement, which is the essence of an art that transforms every detail into universal datum, like the city that nurtures him: Venice, in its architectonic order of beauty rendered unstable by acqua alta.