The Brooklyn Rail

Rome is the great ossuary of Western civilization, and its ceremonial temple is the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, an 1880s grand hall, a sort of Javits Center with a French-Italian neoclassical façade. Inside, the proportions are gigantic, with a large rotunda and marble columns reaching to an imposing vault. It might almost seem like another of Rome’s Baroque churches, if it weren’t for the pink plastic gazebo covered with painterly strokes, right in the heart of the space.

A retrospective of work by Italian artist Carla Accardi (1924–2014), on view here, is making the old bones dance in Rome. Accardi stayed fresh and curious throughout her career, and Triplice Tenda (1969–71), the tent-like, Plexiglas structure, was only the most obvious example. This retrospective on the hundredth anniversary of her birth leads viewers beautifully through a long investigation of a simple idea, with inversions, complications, expansions, displacements, and, finally, grand simplifications. Each of the five rooms plus the central rotunda presented a focused chapter in her evolution. Concision is a virtue, but Accardi was so productive and imaginative, one wished the exhibition were twice the size. The idea, as she often said, was the visual impact of the sign. By “sign” she didn’t mean the kind of advertising graphic the Italian Futurists had pioneered. She meant instead the symbolic marks or forms that indicate the presence of a written language.

The abstract forms she developed suggested many different scripts, from Hebrew to Sanskrit, and she deployed them in a variety of media, including wall reliefs, a translucent plastic material she called “sicofoil,” and, of course, Plexiglas. But her most engrossing work is still her painting. These works have a great deal to suggest not only about language and the play of signs but also about painting and how it “means.” The irony of her work, if there is any, is that she herself insisted that it couldn’t be read, that her paintings didn’t mean anything, and that art as a whole didn’t need to be meaningful. Wasn’t that up to the viewer?

Accardi was part of a wave of artists who came to Rome in the wake of World War II, from an upper middle-class family in Trapani, Sicily, by way of Florence, where she briefly went to art school. The collapse of Fascism (and the eclipse of Futurism), as well as postwar social chaos, had opened niches for artists across Italy. She met the artist Antonio Sanfilippo, whom she would eventually marry, and together they found what has long since become an art-world garden of Eden myth: a community of talented, like-minded, avant-garde artists with a one-for-all and all-for-one spirit who together set out to change the face of art. Their group tended to gather first at the studio of Pietro Consagra, another Sicilian, a sculptor from the other end of the economic spectrum and politically more militant than Accardi. They would continue to influence each other’s work, directly and indirectly, for the next fifty years. The entire group were self-declared Marxists, and they issued their manifesto under the banner Forma 1.

Strangely enough, the exhibition catalogue nowhere reproduces this brief manifesto, but it is crucial for understanding what drove Accardi. The manifesto stressed the objective nature of art and painting, eschewed themes in favor of forms, and insisted that a painting was “a decorative complement to a bare wall,” and a sculpture, furnishing for a room. Lest anyone miss the point, it added, “We are interested in the form of the lemon, not in the lemon itself.” Does this cold shoulder to the real world sound like any Marxism you’ve ever heard of? The deeper impulse was more poignant. In the face of a physically and psychically devastated Europe, these artists felt that renovation could begin only with the renewal of an aesthetic sense, an enhanced appreciation of form, color and their interactions as the basis of human experience of the world. Theirs was a manifesto without a program, and it liberated the artists to travel different directions, from Consagra’s archaeological roughness to Piero Dorazios’s chromaticism. Accardi’s path is perhaps the most engaging of all, but she had to endure a crisis in order to set out.

It came in 1953, when she gave up the last vestiges of post-Cubist representation. No more would things in the world be encoded or even suggested. No lemons of any kind. Instead, a radically simplified palette of white on black, convened in complicated interlocking tangles – anti-painting, she called it. By the time of her extended series, “Integrazione,” in the late 1950s, she had long since given up the easel and painted her canvases on the floor. Being on the floor put her in the midst of what she was making, and photographs show her process as somewhere between mapping, stenciling, and painting. Above all she was physically alive to each painting’s evolution. A fascination with the dialogue between colors, their positivities and negativities, led her to expand her palette to red versus black and orange versus green, among other oppositions, and in the early 1960s, she clarified her visual language to a vocabulary of glyphs or signs that she repeated, modified, and recombined, changing color combinations, size, and physical execution (Plexi).

Accardi was a deeply thoughtful artist but not a theorist. She walked away from popular Italian orthodoxies including Marxism and Feminism. She had no interest in belaboring the point that she was the only woman to emerge as a major figure in that Italian, postwar, artistic generation. Instead, she drew inspiration from other artists, embraced the changes in art going on around her (Plexi again, and painting as wall sculpture), and paid attention above all to what her own work was showing her. With the 1980s and 90s, no one had to tell her to go big or go home. Her forms got simpler, larger and more organic, and it was thrilling in this exhibition to watch her rediscover the pleasure and impact of working large on raw canvas.

Thrilling also to realize that her signs were not simply an elaborate play on language, but in their contrasting order and spontaneity they somehow mirrored other processes, vulnerable to uncertainty and even chaos, from the motions of the stars to the activities of cells and molecules. No wonder critics praised Accardi’s vitalism and “biological grace.” Seeking to do nothing but explore itself, her work insinuated worlds, and even this cavernous hall wasn’t big enough to contain its boundless energy.