The group of works brings together a like set of scores by Fluxus artist and composer Giuseppe Chiari (1926–2007), created during the 1980s and sharing the same large format. The works emerge as the sophisticated outcome of the artist’s reflection on the nexus between musical language and various fields of art, which he had been investigating since the early 1960s.

[..] Not just crossings out, colour is also added. And its role becomes so crucial that the visual dimension takes over from the musical. Hands are put on the music score: it is photographed, blown up and reworked. Coloured felt-tip pen transparencies and fields of coloured acrylic paint redesign the stave. His research on music is deliberately “improper”, his aim to cast the veil off the art system and redefine the very possibilty of boundaries between artistic languages. In his handling of the scores, Chiari’s work encounters the legacy of the ready-made movement begun by Marcel Duchamp, a figure whom the artist knew well and looked towards consciously and critically.

The interventions on the 1980s large-size scores break away from the need to produce a specific sound reading once and for all: the artist’s gestures become freer, autonomous, while the score emerges as the pictoral surface on which graphic signs and colour create a new visual syntax.

Text by Elena Colzi