15 May Luciano Caramel

(from the presentation of the personal exhibition at the Galleria allo Scudo, Verona, June 1990)
Gard continues to call these works “investigations”, to emphasise is faith in a factuality guided by a project, where calculation, although not self-sufficient, preserves its role, its function. In this way the artist reaffirms his allegiance to a new long-established tradition: from the pioneers of the second and third decades of the century, to the articulated expansion over Europe by the rationalists of the thirties, to the innovative propositions of geometrical abstraction after the war, and then of those who elaborated these premises, within the ambit of the New Tendency’s neo-concretism in the first half of the sixties. But with purpose that were not reducible to such precedents, especially with regard to the different function of the project and calculation. In these last works, in particular, as this exhibition makes clear, the sensibility and magic that Dorazio talked of are the real protagonists, in that they are the result of the those analytical procedures. Gard does not eschew the well-tried systematicity of his art. Rather he finalises it towards an absorbed evocativeness, through a choice of colours, wich, while fuller, nonetheless converse with others that maintain his penetrating vivacity, provoking a contrast of notable effect, on the level of the image. Through the evidence of the structures placed at the centre, the more lively ones, this contrast appears to point towards a mysterious system of symbols, almost as in a mandala, a mandala anchored to a lay spirituality, if we may be permitted the incongruity. In the sense that in Gard there is not – or at least in his pictures there does not appear to be – any expansion into metaphysical religiosity, or elevation towards ontological meditation. Rather there is a tendency towards an unspecifiable absolute, which the irregular ovoid form, with its imprecise outlines, in contrast with the sharpness of the outlines of the other figures, symbolises. Here too there is a close continuity with something that underlay the older paintings. But the concision is something wholly new, based on a sureness of lay-out of great structural and chromatic consistency.