| GIUSEPPE CHIARI | Biography | |
| tra suono, segno e colore | Catalogs | |
| curated by Elena Colzi | ||
| 25 September – 13 November 2026 |
Opening Friday, 25 September, from h 11 am to h 8 pm
Concert by Chiara Saccone, h 6:30 pm and h 7 pm
Gesti sul piano, 1962 (7 min.); Metodo per suonare il pianoforte, 1964 (7 min.)
Following the summer break, Il Ponte launches its new exhibition season with a solo show dedicated to Giuseppe Chiari – one of the most multifaceted figures in the art world of the second half of the twentieth century (musician, composer, conceptual artist, creator of contemporary music performances, and a key figure in Fluxus) – marking the centenary of his birth.
The gallery presents a cohesive body of large-format scores created during the 1980s by the artist, whose work it has represented for years and to whom it has dedicated various exhibitions over time. These are photographic images of musical scores – on both glossy and matte paper – and blueprints on tracing paper or acetate, upon which Chiari intervenes using his own language of signs, applying acrylics, felt-tip pens, and pastels.
«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. Along the way, the score – originally understood as a means for writing music – has progressively transformed into a separate conceptual device and field of aesthetic experimentation, capable of going beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and of redefining the relations between notation, image and performative gesture […]. 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. The gestural expression itself is one of the focal points of Chiari’s artistic and musical research: his expression gradually became more abstract, approaching a conception of pictoral action in which the sign loses all descriptive function and asserts itself as an independent mark, also in dialogue with Jackson Pollock’s experiences of action painting and with a broader idea of music as an event and not as a form of representation». (Elena Colzi, Giuseppe Chiari. Tra suono, segno e colore, 2026).
Dr. Elena Colzi’s curation is part of the National Doctorate in Cultural Heritage Sciences at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and of ICONE – European Research Center on the History and Theory of the Image at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan.
