Folder with four screenprints on Colombe Duchêne paper
Dimensions: 67 x 66 cm each
Signature, inscriptions, markings: sheet 1 - 3 signed and dated at lower right, numbered at lower left; sheet 4 signed, dated and numbered at lower right
Copy Number: 8/25 (Épreuves d’artiste)
Printer: Arte 3, Milan
Accession Number: 1000014.1–4
Piero Dorazio's artworks show colors that sometimes overlap in areas, splinter into dashed webs, form a veritable carpet of color. Colors that dynamically flicker across the sheet in luminous bundles, spread out like waves, or are scattered over it in delicate bright swarms. Looking at them, one can associate rays that twitch across the picture like lightning, perhaps rain showers, reflections, light reflexes of the setting sun on a water surface, ignited rockets, flickers of heat, or a flickering television.
Despite the two-dimensionality of the sheets, which lack deep-spatial illusion or representational quality, the viewer can fill the colors with life in his or her perception, with ideas of nature and space. In a less tangible way, moods are suggested, one that is cheerfully elated or emotionally stirred, energetic or even frantic. Dorazio goes even further when he says: "We let an optical phenomenon arise from the two-dimensional surface of the canvas, we create an image that evokes a feeling, a sensation in the viewer, out of all this gradually arises a problem, a judgment, an idea, we can even say a way of thinking and a state of mind. Only then do we have to do with art."1
Loosely related to this are the titles arietta 1 to arietta 4 of the series of silkscreens: they open up another level of meaning. Ariette - a small aria (Ital.: aria = air, manner, melody), usually part of a larger musical work such as an opera, but also a common term in poetry, conveys in a sensitive way the feelings and moods, the affect. In this sense Dorazio uses color analogously to tones in music, he varies color combinations and patterns with similar basic tones, designs color chords, color sounds and melodies, sometimes calm-harmonic, rhythmic-impulsive or fast rushing.
In the poetic work of Giuseppe Ungaretti, a friend of Piero Dorazio, his images seem to have been transformed into poetry:
Cheerful
After all the
fog
there
and there
the stars
reveal themselves
I breathe
the freshness
which the color of the sky
leaves me
Recognize
a fleeting image
myself
Caught in a gyre
immortal2
Sarah Wittig
1 Piero Dorazio (1966) zit. nach: Kat der Ausst. Piero Dorazio, hrsg. v. d. Stadt Bottrop, Quadrat Bottrop Moderne Galerie, Bottrop 1982, o. S.
2 Pietro Ungaretti, Piero Dorazio. Arbeiten auf Papier 1946–1991, Saulgau 1992, S. 110 f.
