The Brooklyn Rail

Qui dentro/in here, the Lucio Pozzi exhibition at Magazzino Italian Art, in Cold Spring, New York, is among the season’s most important. The earliest piece on view is from 1963, and the most recent is from this year, yet this is not a retrospective. Though Pozzi’s oeuvre includes representational images, only a handful of them are included here. The show’s curator, art critic David Ebony, has said that he chose to include only abstract works because they “relate more closely” than the figurative ones “to the Arte Povera masterpieces” in Magazzino’s permanent collection. As Ebony points out, the connection is especially strong when Pozzi employs found materials—scraps of discarded wood, for example. Yet the artist does not belong to this movement or any other, for he has never conformed to the demands of a communal sensibility. He is startlingly independent.

Though most of the works in the exhibition are non-figurative, all are rife with allusion. Geometry predominates, and so it is evidence of Pozzi’s originality that when he gives an object right angles it does not bring Minimalism immediately to mind. By restricting their formal repertory to geometric basics, the Minimalists meant to circumscribe meaning—indeed, to regulate it. With color, texture, and endlessly sophisticated strategies of juxtaposition, Pozzi charges even his starkest works with expansive powers of signification. And these powers were brought into focus by the brilliance of the Magazzino installation, which was a collaboration between Pozzi and Ebony.

Railroad to Paradise (2022) is a forty-eight by thirty-eight-inch slab of plywood covered with black acrylic. Installed about ten feet above the floor, it looks at first glance like a recollection of Minimalist severity. The skewed angle at which this work is hung presents the first sign that Pozzi feels no nostalgia for the work of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and their Minimalist colleagues. They always aligned their objects with the rectangular premises of the gallery interior; and they left the surfaces of those objects uninflected, unlike Pozzi, who overlaid the black surface of Railroad to Paradise with two sets of gray, nearly invisible stripes. Overlying them is a gridded pattern of small, even fainter squares. Tracks and their erasure over time, urban maps, the clash of disparate sign systems—Pozzi evokes all this and more with his modifications of the black surface. And the title of this piece opens onto immense vistas of speculation. That every work on view is as rich with meaning as Railroad to Paradise poses a real difficulty for anyone reviewing this show.

In 1975, Pozzi created The Inventory Game, an irregular grid filled with the names of materials, concepts, procedures, and more. When he begins a new piece, he chooses options from the grid (no less than two, no more than seven) and then, as he has written, he lets “the work grow with the a force that takes nothing for granted: even when it seems to happen in a familiar field like the banal canvas stretched on a wooden frame, I let it reveal itself.” Surprises always emerge. It is impossible to imagine that Pozzi knew in advance that the struts supporting the luminous blue slab—or screen—of Cosmic Cinema (1984) (one of the four elements comprising Quartet), would display the elegant tension of a dancer’s limbs frozen in a difficult pose. His conscious purpose, no doubt, was simply to find a way to keep the slab upright. The elegance of Pozzi’s solution to this practical problem arose from his alertness to the formal options that lurked in the process he initiated. As he works, he is guided not by a plan but by his sense of possibility.

At Magazzino, a reproduction of The Inventory Game was mounted on a narrow wall around the corner from three small landscapes in watercolor, which looked especially small—and incandescent—in the large, skylit gallery that housed the show. On the far side of the gallery, the twenty-four components of Diaspora (2018) claimed a sizable portion of a wall. Made of plywood and painted in bright colors, these elements of the piece seem to exercise varying degrees of magnetic force on one another. Some are so close they almost touch; others drift off and manage, almost, to escape the overall configuration. So Diaspora does and does not coalesce into a coherent pattern. At one moment, its crisscrossed patterns of energy feel centrifugal. A moment later, the work settles into a state of resolution. Yet resolution never looks permanent. Likewise, there is nothing definitive about my description of Cosmic Cinema. The tension I saw in this work could also be seen as its relaxation into gracefulness.

In a recent statement about The Inventory Game, Pozzi said, “I’m very keen on the inconclusivity of my work, because in our packaging civilization we try to conclude and to define, and I like the fact that the operation of my work is open-ended.” Again, the sharpest contrast is with the Minimalists, who insisted that there was one right way to see their works. Pozzi’s openness is not only generous; it presents a challenge. Giving us no way to get his art right, he gives us instead the responsibility of making sense of it for ourselves. Living up to that responsibility makes us aware of our predilections and attitudes, our values and beliefs—even our interpretive styles. We see ourselves seeing and interpretation becomes self-interpretation. His art thus offers you a glimpse of your way of being in the world.