Lucio Pozzi
Artist Statement:
The borderline between Abstract and Realistic art is a changing dimension and I don’t care to define it. All I see is an infinite field of visual language options that range widely. A work of art is a cocktail of ingredients, and I engage in mixing a few. Quality, I think, comes from how I mix, not from what I mix.
There are several lines of experience that I dwell in while painting. An important one is the touch of the hand. It’s an instrument that I adapt to innumerable occasions with different degrees of control in speed of application, tactility, opaqueness, contrast.
The Overlap group consists of my painting irregular, masking tape-generated grids one on top of the other, with almost no consideration for the layer that’s underneath. The fields I paint on are rectangular and the patterns appear to continue beyond the surface’s edge. I use quick drying vinylic and acrylic paint.
Improvisation is a key to what I do. The viewers may retrace my painterly thoughts and all the while re-invent what they see in their own terms.
Artist Biography:
Painting and then all art became my saving raft from an early age. First confusedly then more clearly, I set out to break down the censorship rigid categories can impose on my critical and creative impulse. I simply legitimatized them all as useful instruments while removing from them any binding power they might have on my explorations.
After first experiences with the tactile and atmospheric painting of Informel artists in Milan and the use of raw materials after Alberto Burri in Rome, arriving in New York in 1962 was like discovering a new planet. Individual feeling and thought were here engaged in as totalities and the theoretical underpinnings of the art were not imposed as a prescription as they were in Italy or France.
Teaching at the Cooper Union and then at School of Visual Arts helped me integrate in the local culture and made me detect the new budding conformities of the art market and that I could mark myself away from them without isolating myself. I started exhibiting with John Weber who became a staunch supporter even while I was evolving from the art he was known for, because he understood I represented the next step where analysis begins to be used as a jumping board towards more complex eventualities and emotional engagements.
When Merrill Wagner suggested I join the American Abstract Artists, I accepted on the condition that they knew I not only work within reductivist formats or non-representational schemes but also paint figurative images. I was elated to be accepted as a sign that the definition of abstraction could expand in the wider semiotic field I feel echoes our society at large.
My life has been centered in New York and extended worldwide including Italy, the kernel that keeps seeping into my work. I feel this city is my culture.
Member Since: 1983
