Poverty can be enriching, at least when you’re talking about the Italian povera movement of the late ’60s and ’70s that Giorgio Griffa emerged from. Arte povera was an avant-garde movement that aimed to build a kind of poetry out of scrappy, everyday materials. For Griffa, this meant taking canvas off the frames, dismantling its parts, and developing a kind of stripped-back visual lyricism out of the very building blocks of painting.
A vocabulary of brightly coloured marks runs riot across his largely abstract paintings in this retrospective: rows of squiggles, doodle-like curlicues, swarms of tapering lines. There’s a weird, arbitrary quality to much of them, as if they’re merely there to stake some claim to the picture plane. In the way some lurk at the edges, you’re half-reminded of that way kids draw a band of blue at the top of a page to illustrate sky.
Not that Griffa is interested in illustrating sky, or illustrating anything at all for that matter: these are entirely abstract works that refer to nothing but their own making. The effect of this is that every last incident in each piece – a hanging frond of fabric, a missing chunk of paper – becomes an aesthetic consideration. This really starts to get interesting in Griffa’s use of numbers. In some works, they label an adjacent line of colour; in others, they take on a wayward life of their own.
The use of numerals – and the odd piece of text – ties Griffa to American conceptualists like Mel Bochner and Bruce Nauman. But Griffa remains a European at heart – unlike the linguistic games of those on the other side of the pond, he’s never entirely renounced a kind of Old World pictorial beauty. Light, airy and silently captivating in rooms at the Camden Arts Centre, his work is all the better for it.