The Roots of Painting - Giorgio Griffa at the Centre Pompidou

“I don’t depict anything, I paint,” responded Giorgio Griffa, in 1972, to someone who questioned the sense of his work. As he reaches his 85th birthday, the artist from Turin carries forward his own banner determinedly in the same studio which saw the birth of his revolutionary works of the 1970s. Among the most original voices of the painting of the second-half of the XX Century, this Spring, Griffa is at the centre of an important exhibition at the Centre Pompidou - a delectable selection of works, created between 1969 and 2021, retracing his prolific career, highlighting its distinct and unique traits. Lines, points, stains and letters in luminous colours alternate on the raw canvases, unbacked and unframed, which the artist generally paints kneeling on the floor. His brushstrokes stand out for their extreme formal simplicity, fulfilling the desire of a language potentially accessible to all. Behind the paintings, in fact, lies no hidden meaning, just the search for the essence of painting, carried out by experimenting with three fundamental elements - brushstrokes, canvas and colour. Touching upon, one by one, Analytical Painting, Arte Povera and Minimalism, Griffa has shown himself, in the end, a totally independent artist, capable of following his own path for fifty years, renewing himself daily with poetry and vitality.