The experience of Colour Astrazione Oggettiva

The experience of Colour Astrazione Oggettiva

In the autumn of 1976, six artists from Italy issued their manifesto of ‘Objective Abstraction’:

Mauro Cappelletti

Diego Mazzonelli

Gianni Pellegrini

Aldo Schmid

Luigi Senesi

Giuseppe Wenter Marini

Each artist possessed a unique and independent vision; what united them was the way in which they located colour at the heart of their research, employing it as a means through which to investigate a range of different pictorial and perceptual problems. Emblematic in this respect were Mazzonelli’s explortations of the absorbency of black.

They rejected the importance of the gesture and of the irrational in their artistic practice, prizing control, order and conscious action over chance and improvisation – in short, focusing on abstraction’s potential as a toll for objective enquiry rather than subjective self- expression. Instinct was set aside in favour of discipline, resulting in the creation of an impersonal art that minimised the significance of an emotional response on the part either the painter or the viewer.

The works produced by the group echoed ideas and formal qualities evident in certain earlier avant-garde tendencies such as ‘concrete’ painting, which has stressed the artwork’s need to possess an internal logic rather than to reflect external reality, however, they were also related to the optical-perceptual researchers carried out since 1960s’s. The group’ experimentation represents a notable contribution to the evolution of abstract painting in post war Italy.