Rodolfo Aricò (1930-2002) Mathis der Maler, 1974.
For ArtGenève 2017, Luxembourg & Dayan will present a group of works by the Italian artist Rodolfo Aricò. Continuing the gallery’s long-standing engagement with post-war Italian art and its rediscovery in a contempo- rary context, this presentation explores the work of an artist who was known primarily for his ‘object-paintings’ which Aricò developed 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, explor- ing geometry, perspective, and phenomenology, undermining the rigid distinction between the disciplines of painting and sculpture. Aricò is known to have been a fervent reader of philosophy and a talented writer in his own right. He was particularly in uenced by the writings of Edmund Husserl on Phenomenology and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialist thought. Throughout his entire career Aricò was engaged in a continuous dialogue with the history of perspective, its relation to ideology, and its potential role in art of his own time.
In a similar way to his American contemporaries, Aricò was interested by the idea of shifting the main focus of attention in his work from the object of display to the relationship between the object and the perceiving subject. In or- der to do so, he drew on his professional formation and employed different architectural methodologies in his paintings that challenge the pictorial space.
Aricò’s 'object-paintings' invite the viewer to engage in an immersive experience, one that no longer shows an object in perspec- tive but functions as perspective in its own right.