Mino Argento
Throughout the seventies his work would be presented alongside such other well known artists as Frank Stella, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ronald Davis, Ruth Vollmer, Jack Youngerman, Marino Marini, Giorgio de Chirico and Shusaku Arakawa.
Using oil, acrylic and occasionally graphite in conjunction with the gesso, these high-key paintings are not about "being white" but are essentially concerned with the absence color.
In 1968, Marcello Venturoli wrote: And one that reaches far greater results pictorial Impressionism Liberty, now going with a realistic, where love and female sovereign, now with a look more amused than ever to the beloved models, but the implications to the environment, rich the decorative details of backgrounds, collages, compartments, which resemble those of Leonardo Cremonini.
[3]In 1977, Noel Frackman wrote in Arts Magazine: No lines or forms are extraneous; the application of the paint itself, the juxtapositions of elements all work towards a tense, euclidean harmony.
The varying thickness of drawn lines and an unusual sensitivity for the weight of various forms lift these paintings out of the realm of simple geometric constructions into the area of the theoretical.
[4]In 1977, Michael Florescu wrote in Arts Magazine: Is this his rendering of a far distant race-memory, the way in which, for instance, the pyramids came to be built, where the raw material of the structure evolved into the mechanics by which similar enterprises came about in the future?
Or are we, at this point in time, to interpret the physical effect of mistiness the deliberate fragmentation and obscuring of the image (elsewhere a seemingly endless vista of virgin grid) as representing no less that visible breath of a concerned Creator!
Argento conveys feeling by means of his play with perspectives, with units of measurement, with directional symbols, with modes of calculation, and with ventors of suggested light, He creates illusions of refraction, causing the spectator to look at his squares.
[7]In 1988, Cathy Curtis wrote in the Los Angeles Times: Mino Argento's checkerboard-strewn abstractions are an '80s version of the lightweight sensibility of those School of Paris painters who embroidered on the big guys' themes.
Especially rewarding is the display of relatively artists: Mino Argento restrained geometry in his painting wars with the infinity of space in the gentle gradations of background color.
Sculpture for the most part looked far more slick that painting in this exhibition, but Gio Pomodoro enormous bronze slabs in Contatti: 1970, gave an authentic sense of excitement and tension.
Jean Allemand, Shusaku Arakawa, Mino Argento, Juhana Blomstedt, Ronald Davis, Maxime Defert, Michel Gueranger, Patrick Ireland, Nicholas Krushenick, Barry Le Va, Finn Mickelborg, Philippe Morisson, Georges Noel and Frank Stella.
To call this a revival of illusionism, is to forget that such a definition makes sense only when speaking in terms of representation, and not in situations of intensity and of force rather than of form.
The simultaneous development of these studies on both sides of the Atlantic unknown even to the painters involved is the best evidence of their necessity as if the modernism of pictorial space was ceasing to be found in reference to flatness, to become an exploration of its own intensities.
