03 Dec Gabriella Belli New Objectives – 2015

( from the presentation of the anthology exhibition 1969-2015 “ Chromatism and optical art”, International Gallery of Modern Art, Ca’ Pesaro, Foundation Museums of Venice ).

For Ferruccio Gard, this is a happy season of renewed research on the theme of color and form, always a leitmotif of his artistic journey. The glorious exhibition opening today at Ca’ Pesaro is the mature fruit of studies that have consistently engaged Gard’s attention for over 40 years, work that is never repetitive but has a stupefying ability for endless renewal. In his paintings, Gard creates highly original formal and compositional solutions to the nth term, magical combinations of forms and colors that are born of the artist’s commitment to painting, in his vision of the primary importance of form and color. Paying consistent attention to geometric composition with chromatic and spatial themes, in these latest works, Gard grapples with the complexity of black and white, in other words, the extremes of the tonal scale of colors that define the absolute nothing and the absolute all. In Gard’s work, black and white – opposing and attracting colors – represent a thought-provoking evolution that liberates his creativity from the long-practiced bounds of poetics of light and color, concentrating all his attention on pure visual perception, analyzing optical and psychological procedures with lucid rigor. Feruccio Gard is the heir of a great tradition that developed at the end of the 1950s, based on the proposals of Bauhaus and the studies of Moholy-Nagy and Albers. He uses a contemporary slant to interpret the effects of the optical and kinetic experimentation in that painting, following the interference of lines and color as well as gestalt effects on perception. By focusing on this new approach, in a paramount demonstration of his gift, Ferruccio Gard conquers completely new, unexplored territory thanks to a pictorial skill and an intellectual curiosity clearly gratified by his new painting. From optical art, Gard borrows the geometric and modular grids that favor the perception of an optical illusion. At the same time, even in black and white his talent gives us opulent patterns, a sort of iron grating that we peer through to discover a new spatial dimension. Gard is no stranger to the Ca’ Pescaro International Art Gallery, and the Venetian artist brings fresh perspective to this new cycle of abstract geometric painting, an area which has again caught the interest of the most astute art critics. In the year of the Biennale, which is exploring political themes of strong moral tension, this compact, systematic sequence of real painting gives us the feeling of a visit to a garden of blooms, reuniting the hierarchies of the essential tools of
painying, this tribute to a master of contemporary Venetian art.