The result of an extraordinary collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, where the artist's archive and library are kept, and with Anja Picelj Kosak, daughter of the artist who followed the entire curatorial and exhibition project with passionate participation, it is an unmissable opportunity to reread the international movement of Nove Tendencije, this is the original Croatian name of New Trends, of which Picelj was the protagonist and founder. New Trends was born in Zagreb, Croatia (then Yugoslavia) in 1961. It was in that year that, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the first exhibition was held where a team of artists and critics from all over the world gathered: from the ZERO and GRAV groups, to the N and T groups. In addition to retracing the extraordinary role played by Picelj in the artistic Neo-avant-gardes of the 60s and 70s, the Lugano exhibition also aims to compare his research with that of some artists who participated in the various editions of New Trends. The works of Otto Piene and Heinz Mack of Gruppo Zero in Düsseldorf will be exhibited in the gallery: the first, which was present at all editions from 1961 to 1969, a Fire Painting dated 1964; by Mack will be exhibited a Lichtrelief, vibratile aluminum folded and worked to create rhythmic undulations of light. Mack's work is very much in line with those of New Trends: the artist took part in the Yugoslav editions of 1961, 1963, 1969, as well as that of 1964 in Leverkusen. In the same year, in Paris, Walter Leblanc was among the guests at Nouvelle Tendance. Propositions visuelles du mouvement international, a presentation of New Trends held at the Palais du Louvre and the Musée des arts decoratifs. His MobiloStatique LB 36, from 1962, is a work that plays with the viewer's gaze, shaking its perception in the apparent virtual motility of the reds and blues, colors also loved by Picelj in his 1 CTS-1966, made with a modulation of enamelled metals of very high formal perfection. In the 1970 Lugano exhibition Mercuriale by Grazia Varisco will tell the role of one of the few female figures of New Trends, whose last edition in 1973 was also attended by Jesús-Rafael Soto, with two works and a vibrating environment to which the work Escritura responds from 1973 exhibited by Cortesi, a dense and lively texture that perfectly represents the language of the Venezuelan artist. Finally, an important presence is that of Paolo Scheggi, with a work from 1962 entitled Per una situation: friend, as well as colleague, of Ivan Picelj, with whom he had a long dialogue on the possibility of expanding the cultural operations of the movement, such as demonstrated by the shots that portray them together in 1969, on the occasion of the fourth edition of New Tendencies, published in the rich catalog published by Mousse, complete with numerous period photographs, documents and posters, many of which have never been published before. From the finely worked wooden panels to obtain vibrant reliefs, to the iridescent textures of metals, brass and silver, made in the early 60s. From the optical investigations of the works of the mid-60s, to the painted metal modules, with the chiseled rhythms of the metal left pure, or at most played between the brightness and absorbency of black, of the works of the early 70s, Picelj's works are part of the collections of major international museums, from the MoMA in New York to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
In London, the Checkmate exhibition brings together works by Alberto Biasi, Alighiero Boetti, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Tony Cragg, Piero Dorazio, Tano Festa, Joseph Kosuth, Heinz Mack, Giulio Paolini, Jesús-Rafael Soto, Grazia Varisco. The exhibition suggests a path of critical reading through the idea that the work of art is the quintessential place of visual and conceptual displacement, not only in that it is capable of surprising the public's expectations, with the provocation inherent in its forms, but also because it knows how to create short circuits between different elements, bringing out new readings that address the foundations of time, space and language. Right from the title, the exhibition offers itself to different interpretative keys: from the image of the chessboard as a reasoned grid with which the artist organizes the flow of intuition in a system of language, to "a game board" where to weave strategies and interact with the spectators. Checkmate proposes relationships both between works created between the late 50s and 70s, and belonging to the current period. It is in fact from two recent works, Zeuxi and Parrasio of 2003 and Points of view of 2007, signed respectively by Giulio Paolini and Tony Cragg, placed in an ideal visual diagonal in the gallery space, that the exhibition itinerary starts. Both works question the spectator about the mystery of the work, as suggested by Giulio Paolini in relation to his lyrical and metaphysical installation, of which a second version is conserved at the Castello di Rivoli: «The author, rival of himself, in front of the primacy of the work […] dissolves, the work waits for the image». Point of view by Tony Cragg, created in 2007, bears witness to this expectation, which ideally looks to Giulio Paolini: the viewer finds and loses profiles of faces, in an alternation of presences and absences of volumes.
The game played at the Cortesi Gallery is articulated on this ambiguity: from the work of Joseph Kosuth, Art as idea as idea (1967), to Uno, cento, mille (1979) by Alighiero Boetti, an alphabet denied by strokes of a blue ballpoint pen , where the only survivors are the commas on the chessboard of the unspoken and intuitions. The answer is Horizon + pyramid, a metaphysical landscape by Heinz Mack from 1972, where silhouetted against an aluminum field, a horizon is indicated by the vertex of a pyramid in turn defined by a horizon, in a conceptual game of references. The works belonging to the great post-spatial and kinetic-programmed experimental season are countered: the Surface (1987) by Enrico Castellani, amidst densification and drowning of light and shadows; the everted forms drawn on the canvas of Agostino Bonalumi's 1967 work; the lamellar tensions by Alberto Biasi, which move along a wheel of twisted diagonals (1962-1966); the reticular painting by Piero Dorazio, entitled Little concern (1962-1963), a play between orange and blue, in all its shades. And the vibrating aluminum chessboard by Jesús Rafael Soto that conflicts with a red field, tautologically entitled Purpura y plata from 1969. Finally, the reds and blues of the curtain opened on the Detail of the window of Tano Festa of 1965 put the exhibition path back into play, asking the public to create for themselves, in the name of a free invention of the rules of the game, the journey into the languages of the visual, freely composing and breaking down their own aesthetic vision, offering them those tools of communicating, and interpreting, the work of 'art. The exhibition itinerary, accompanied by an unpublished publication, gives the public the opportunity to restart with the game, inventing new possibilities in the match between gaze, emotion, relationship, through the three magnetic tables by Grazia Varisco, created in the late 50s. and the threshold of the 60s.
