The Sharper Image

The GR Gallery is undertaking its American adventure with an exhibition dedicated to the wide, articulated and even contradictory world of perception. The choice has precise foundations in the very DNA of the Gallery, because its Italian sister, the Studio GR, has certainly been the reference gallery in Italy, but even perhaps in Europe, since the end of last century and for all these years, to all the world of Optical and Programmatic Art and to many aspects of the varied world of “perception”. The inexhaustible activity of this small gallery located in the Italian province is partly represented by some focused initiatives: the salvage and the re-launch, almost twenty years ago, of one of the most significant groups among the European avant-gardes in the ‘60s, the GRAV in Paris - Group de recherche art visuelle -, with the re-launch of artists like Le Parc, Sobrino, Garcia Rossi and Demarco in particular; the restart of one of the Italian masters of Programmed Art, Alberto Biasi, co-founder of the Group N in Padua, both in a historical vision and in a comparative analysis with his creations of the last years; the re-discovery of Masters who seemed abandoned even if they had been decisive on the field of the perceptive research, like the Venetian Franco Costalonga and Edoer Agostini, or Claudio Rotta Loria from Piedmont; the re-enhancement of the most important European urban planner of the color, Jorrit Tornquist, mostly on the artistic level. So, referring again to this area of interest, many supporting, sponsoring and promoting initiatives for young worthy and talented artists have been actualized to allow them develop their research in the varied perceptive fields: Marcello De Angelis, Mara Fabbro, Paolo Radi, Emanuela Fiorelli, and two Masters, Marco Casentini and Riccardo De Marchi, still young, but who have already drawn original paths, the former on the field of chromatic perception, the latter on the level of a spatial- narrative vision. This activity of promotion and salvage, even commercial, starting from its birth that dates back at about 40 years ago, transformed, more and more in time, into an expositive activity, of organization and receivership of exhibitions in nearly all the most important museums of Europe and in many of South America as well, taking advantage of the very tight connection with the writer of these lines, Giovanni Granzotto. Now the time has come to make these artists known, maybe with further new discoveries and inclusions, also in the U.S., also in New York, where exactly 50 years ago one of the fundamental bridges of the avant-gardes of every country was realized: The Responsive Eye. That exhibition seemed to open a new frontier indeed, seemed to mark the end of the “Informel”, not through the metropolitan coils of Pop Art, but for the impetuous overcoming of the winds of Optical Art, Kinetic Art, Programmatic Art
Giovanni Granzotto