18 May Giovanni Granzotto

(from the presentation of the exhibition “ Movement as a Message”, International Triennale of Contemporary Art, National Gallery in Prague, June- September 2008)

Following a happy intuition that had flashed upon him back in the seventies, Ferruccio Gard returned to the heart of the element of colour and broadened it – or rather released the centrifugal, expansive and diffusive charge of the pigment from the geometrical cage, and from its bonds and linear scaffolding, allowing the colour to walk by itself, but not in the impulsive terms of pure deflagration, of randomness and absolute instability. Gard knew the properties of that element so well that he could give it room to build, through the encounter of the pigments and their proliferation – which was not at all chaotic, was controlled but not restrained – a new, fantastic but solid interpretation of reality. He did not guide or direct the material: he just channelled it into the containing basins of his “visions”, and left each deflagration, as in an unceasing and magical repetition of the Big Bang, to find its point of equilibrium, to regain its own natural settlement, allowing the pigments to recognise their kindred spirits and their opposites; leaving the colour to dance both alone and with others, and letting every chromatic centre become a point of flight, strength and support at the same time. The result was a spectacular flaring firmament in which Gard proposed a new road for modern neo-plasticism, a new road in syntactical and linguistic terms, but one that looked back to an ancient and original nucleus, which remained the basis for every creative process. In earlier works the central nucleus, which for Caramel seemed more lively and strident, with respect to the deep and silent blacks of the background, nonetheless supported the whole architectural lay-out of the composition, and from their weighty fixity relaunched the joyous rhythm of the colour, or rather a sort of abstract hieraticism; now, however, the colour seems to spill over the borders and fences, rolling out inexorably over the prairies of pure form and pure colour. The cloud, the atoll, the stippled and coloured dust, apparently – only apparently – indefinite, declares itself with the magmatic energy of the memory of an emersion from an indistinct and subterranean world; it immediately rediscovers the oceans that settle down into monochromatic backgrounds, defining and dividing the surface according to the chromatic and diffusive value of each single chromatic range.