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Respect to Gillo Dorfles, the oldest living art critic, 103

“One of the things that has always interested me and that interests me most is studying the person, ‘man’ as he is, his virtues and his defects. […] I’ve always been curious about the world and I think that this depends uniquely on the great interest I’ve always felt, and still feel, for my fellow man. Fortunately, other people interest me more than myself.”
(Gillo Dorfles, Catalogue raisonné, Mazzotta, 2010)

The Fondazione Marconi is going to present an exhibition devoted to the works of Gillo Dorfles (Trieste, 12 aprile 1910), a polyhedric personality of the contemporary artistic and cultural scene. Artist, teacher of aesthetics, philosopher and an extremely prolific and innovative art critic, Gillo Dorfles is a direct witness of XXth century artistic movements in which he is involved sometimes as a protagonist, some others as a careful critic and observer.

Dorfles devotes himself to painting since the early Thirties. He starts executing surreal compositions in egg tempera, a technique used by the XVth century masters. The artist himself admits that in those years he was not aiming to say something precise. Certain pre-existent symbols interested him: the cross, the moon and the sun were archetypal forms that seemed particularly suggestive to him and he used them but also in a very casual way. Since the beginning his painting – defined “organic” and “vaguely surreal” – is unencumbered by any subjection to rigid geometric structures and by the given rules of a sterile abstract style. Actually, his painting – as he himself says about his art – draws its raison d’être from an inner need to show the images that surface in his mind and to visualize the most urgent conscious and unconscious impressions that strike him.

In 1948 Dorfles is among the founders of MAC (Concrete Art Movement) of which he is one of the main exponents and whose artistic theories he inquiries with particular attention and sensitivity. The period from 1958 sees a progressive reduction in his pictorial activity due to his teaching work, his studies in aesthetics and art criticism, and his intense activity as a writer. In these years various artistic movements follow one another: Informal Art, Pop Art, Arte Povera – movements that interest Dorfles as an art critic but are far removed from his sensibility as a painter and bring him to leave the artistic scene, where he returns only in the early Eighties.

The exhibition at the Fondazione Marconi is devoted to the last thirty years of Dorfles’s production, made up of a large series of mixed media works on cardboard (felt pen, acrylic, watercolour), ceramics and sculptures that Dorfles executes with renewed inspiration. The exhibition presents a selection of thirty works among acrylics on canvas, ceramics and a large-sized sculpture, created in polychrome enamels by the artist this same year. Dorfles’s disturbing and grotesque atmospheres (Capovolgimento, 1993) reappear in his latest production, as well as his metamorphic figures enclosed in black (L’orecchio di Dio and Simbiosi di esseri, 1996) and his typical symbolic characters, some inquiring and disturbing (Due simbionti, 2008), others ironic and playful (Il giocoliere, 2006).

The exhibition programme also includes two lectures (January 21 and February 11, 2014) that will be held by the artist himself, curator Luigi Sansone and art critic Claudio Cerritelli: The Renovation of Italian Art in the 1940s-1950s and A Survey on the Contemporary Art Scene, an additional testimony of Gillo Dorfles’s inexhaustible passion not only for art and its motivations but also for the careful and lucid observation of its underlying anthropological, social and cultural phenomena.

“Gillo Dorfles. Ieri e oggi”. Curated by Luigi Sansone Opening: January 14, 2014 from 6 pm. From January 15 to February 22, 2014. Fondazione Marconi Arte moderna e contemporanea.

January 11, 2014