Rodolfo Aricò: Line of Demarcation

Rodolfo Aricò is known primarily for his ‘object-paintings’, which he began to develop during the 1960s and which evolved throughout his entire career. Trained in Architecture, his works manifest a philosophical interest in the notions of time and space, exploring geometry, perspective, and phenomenology, hereby undermining the rigid distinction between the disciplines of painting and sculpture.

In his catalogue essay for Aricò’s 1967 exhibition at the renowned Galleria L’Attico in Rome, Giulio Carlo Argan noted that Aricò is exploring “the boundary between object and image. What he would like to obtain is not the diverse consistency of the two fields but the line of demarcation, the critical point of passage from the state of the object to the state of the image and the contrary”. And indeed, the works of Rodolfo Aricò challenge the very deceiving mechanisms that they set up. They invite the viewer to reside literally as well as metaphorically on the line of demarcation between depth and flatness, image and object. But perhaps most importantly in our contemporary context, these works encourage us to overcome the limiting historical and geographical categories through which we interpret much of the work produced both by his American and his European contemporaries, transforming the line that distinguishes the two currents into that which binds them together. 

This catalogue includes new essays by Claire Gilman, curator at the Drawing Center, New York, art historian Alex Bacon, and Francesca Pola, art historian and curator of the Archivio Rodolfo Aricò.