Frittelli arte contemporanea dedicates to Dadamaino (Eduarda Emilia Maino, Milan 1930-2004) a monographic exhibition curated by Flaminio Gualdoni with the collaboration of Paolo Campiglio, realized thanks to the contribution of the Dadamaino Archive, which traces the research on the sign undertaken by the artist in the mid-1970s.

The exhibition documents the complex conjuncture that began with the series Inconscio Razionale [Rational Unconscious] and Costellazioni [Constellations] and fully developed with Passo dopo Passo [Step by Step] and above all Il movimento delle cose [The movement of Things], as the two vast works presented at the 1990 Venice Biennial are titled. Here Dadamaino literally fills the large surfaces with signs, which seem to float on the translucent surface of the material used, and which follow irregular patterns, not designed according to a preventive method, but as if transcribing live the stream of consciousness that animates the artist. But the artist warns: “...it is a cosmos, not a chaos”: Dadamaino forces the spectator to question his own precognitions, opening cycles that only follow the times and modes of his own inflexible brooding, his own unsatisfiable searching.

As Flaminio Gualdoni wrote: “The sign is an indefinite moneme in itself, that from any point of the equivalent space begins to multiply as if by cellular proliferation, to seed the surface following divergent courses, rarefied thickenings, levitating intensities, dispersed attractions... not construct, equilibrium, but rather circulating and rich tension, energy that, from the physiological and affective awareness of the body it traces, begins to pour out and pulsate in this space of intuited rather than defined objectivity.”

The exhibition spaces make it possible to show the reasons and qualities of the transition to this phase, through the display of mostly unpublished materials, and the very special nature of this “challenge to infinity”.

“Il movimento delle cose [The movement of Things] consists of the representation, metaphorical of course, of a biological and existential destiny or set of destinies. It is the rhythms of people who meet, love each other, pulsate and move, change.” Dadamaino