PITTURA/MATERIALE [Painting/Material] is a sort of a reconnaissance in exhibition form of a series of artistic practices that developed in Florence in the mid-1970s.

This was for the city a period rich in initiatives, entirely private, concerning contemporary art, in an attempt to inscribe it again, after years of (more or less splendid) isolation, in the maps of international art: from the archive/publishing house/bookshop Centro Di to the Schema Gallery, from the video production house Art Tapes 22 to the self-managed space of Zona.

Among the artists emerging in the city at that time, Paolo Masi (Florence 1933) and Lanfranco Baldi (Florence 1938 - 1990), who were united by a common path through Informal Art and Geometric Abstractionism from the late 1950s to that time, and with them the younger Luciano Bartolini (L'Anchetta, Fiesole 1948 - Milan 1994), who had a different background and culture, stand out. What unites them for a brief but significant period of time, which is also the one considered in this exhibition, is a series of similar, sometimes even common artistic practices that aim to detect the primordial substratum of painting identified in its two-dimensional support captured in its bare materiality.

Wooden boards, framed canvases, paper and cardboard, sometimes surfaces of other materials, are emphasised as “beginning” of painting and its concrete and experiential practice. Far from the so-called international Analytical Painting, from Robert Ryman to Giorgio Griffa, which aims at celebrating the surface of painting in both analytical and lyrical sense, they look at the material and original “blank page”, as an empty inscription board, of which the few elementary tracing marks  tend to emphasize its nature and potentiality.

If painting, at this stage of its evolution and history, is their point of departure, that of arrival, or momentary transit, is what their art at that moment presents in the flagrant concreteness of its material supports, which, through their work, are charged with meaning.

The works of these three Florentine artists are accompanied by others by international artists who seem to share their sensibilities and intentions, such as those by Lucio Pozzi (Milan, 1935) and Richard Tuttle (Rahway, New Jersey, 1941).

Finally, as a corollary, recent works by two young Tuscan artists, Emanuele Becheri (Prato, 1973) and Filippo Manzini (Florence, 1975), are presented, which seem to take up both those themes and that vein of sensitivity at a distance of thirty years, considering that the general context has changed completely and that their results therefore present other values and other unprecedented qualities.