28 Mar Piero Dorazio

(from the presentation of the Personal Exhibition at Mantegna’s house, Mantua, April-May 1988)

The conquests of contemporary art from impressionism onwards and in particular the liberation of the purely visual language of painting, confirmed by the tendencies of abstract art during the post-war period, are as yet undigested by many pseudo-modern and trans-avantgardist artists still rooted in the past, by many critics and many art-dealers and scholars. Today it is no longer a question of the ideological or theoretical conflict between “figurative” and “non-figurative” art; because, as we know, what is preached on all sides now is the ecumenical criterion of “quality”, as if it could exist outside, or above, or in addition to the ethical conception, the linguistic structure of the work.
It is Gard’s vision that arouses least sympathy, that proves the most difficult to pursue and to read, because it is the purest, the one that moves furthest from literature and from the “literary” relationship with life, which many would like to force on painting today. This despite the fact that the modulations of space and colour that Gard presents have a robust and well-tried tradition behind them. His art came into being in the real world of visual sensations, from a rib of the cubism of Braque, of Gris, and later, from that of Freundlich and then from the artists of Cercle et Carrè and Abstraction/Crèation, the “purism” of Ozenfant, Mondrian, Sofia Tauber, Albers, Glarner, Max Bill and so on. Ferruccio Gard adds to this tradition his variations, with an original contribution of the articulation of value and chromatic scales, together with harmonious structures that contain them. He is not therefore an “optical” painter, one of those who simply draw and then colour in, but a painter whose sensibility manages to combine to magical effect the two perpetual protagonists of painting: “Form and Colour”.