The exhibition Alberto Biasi—Light Visions. Visions of lightness, visions of light opens on Tuesday, 11th October 2016 at Dep Art Gallery in Milan. Through 35 works that retrace the main phases of the artist career from 1960 to nowadays, this solo exhibition intends to document the vitality of the object-research of this undisputed protagonist of European art and to act as an ideal counterpoint and complement to the exhibition currently on show at Palazzo Preotrio in Cittadella (Padua), dedicated, instead, exclusively to its parallel environmental and immersive works. The exhibition is on until 17th December and includes significant works representative of the different phases of Biasi's research—Trame, Rilievi ottico-dinamici, Oggetti ottico-dinamici, Forme dinamiche, Interferenze dinamiche, Politipi–plus two new works created specifically for the Gallery space: a Politipo and a sequence of Gocce.
The title of the exhibition, Light Visions, must be interpreted in its intentional ambiguity (the word light, in fact, recalls both the noun and the adjective) and it refers to 'light' as an element always characterising the creativity of the artist, but also to another fundamental element of his work which is the physical and ideal 'lightness' which has always identified his poetics and realisations.
Biasi took his first steps at the end of the Fifties—in a context where he immediately started to dialogue with the emerging situations of Azimut and ZERO–moving from a vision of zeroing the surface that brought to the redefinition of the very statutes of 'image', in particular through the employment of new techniques, free experimentations of materials and structures, and researches of interaction between artworks and viewers. The artist preferred a rational and systematic vision of the artistic action, conceived as an instrument of knowledge of the elementary coordinates of human experience such as seeing and moving. 'His pathway–as Francesca Pola explains in her text published in the catalogue—finds his unmistakable figure in that great European art laboratory which was the programmed and kinetic art of the sixties; in the following decades, he also created works in which the optical dynamism of an image awakes the attention of the viewer who is now intentionally involved not only into a contemplative neutrality, but also into an active process of reasoning, experiencing and questioning of his sensory and mental potentials, in a constant challenge to the conventions of his relationship with the world'.
A fundamental and constant principle in the work of Biasi is the presence of a concrete visual energy, determined by its light component, which is by nature an element that modifies the image, according to a physical-perceptual variation aimed at favouring the experience of a gap between objective reality and visual work. A dialogue between positive and negative space often builds up the real structure of the image, proceeding according to a multi-purpose dynamic, centripetal and centrifugal at the same time, multiplied and expanded by the repetition of the focal element and the interweaving of radiating structures. The offset of the centre, the opening of irregular areas that contradict the basic geometrical structure, the intention to emphasise the energy component and visual intersection, the layering of the image both perceptually and structurally, open and deepen optical overlapping, that place some works by Biasi next to the contemporary perceptual researches of Optical Art. The richness and unpredictability of this dynamic and kinetic aspect, however, raises the issue of the complexity and uniqueness of the production of Biasi in the context of the groups of Programmed Art during the sixties, also and especially in the conception and fulfilment of complex, multi-perceptual structures precociously declined on an environmental scale.
The exhibition is completed by bilingual, Italian and English catalogue, with an essay by Francesca Pola.
Press release courtesy Dep Art Gallery.