An abstractionist in New York

Published: 2009 - September/October, Cultural and Artistic Paths

A tale made up of bright colors, engaged in a perfect dialogue marked by harmony and musicality: the paintings of Ferruccio Gard, a famous exponent of contemporary abstractionism, are stories written with a sense of balance, liquid geometries able to capture the visitor’s eye and make it loose itself in the magnetic movement of forms.
Just back from New York, where his most recent exposition “Painted Venice” was featured last May by the city’s Italian Cultural Institute, the artist answered our questions about his US show.
“It has been an exceptional experience”, he said, “both because it was my first time in a city like New York, and because I met with an excellent response from many visitors, for the most part Americans, who proved fervently interested in culture.”
Venice is certainly a steady source of inspiration for Gard, so much to make him call the wonder of nature in the lagoon that he admires from his studio on Lido island “a hymn and a symphony of inebriant colors”; but at the same time, what clearly shines through his words is the immediate spell and the attraction exerted by the US metropolis. Gard speaks of his desire to purchase a studio in New York that he defines a “spacious” city: a definition all the more significant since it comes from someone who has made the space, its constant exploration, its endless variations and, finally, its relation to colors and their emotional power the crucial elements of the artistic course on which he keeps on maturing.
The exhibition, intended to represent the region of Veneto on the occasion of Italy’s National Day, whose celebration in New York last June had been organized by the Italian Embassy together with the Italian Cultural Institute, affirmed the international air about Gard’s work, and bore evidence of a deep bond between two cities – Venice and New York, of course – that made, and still make, polymorphism, multiculturalism and commixture their characteristic traits, in a dialogue that means constant movement and investigation.
After all, forms, movement and space are the materials that give birth to the works of Ferruccio Gard, capable of decomposing and recomposing colors, taking the viewer for an intense and harmonious chromatic and emotional trip. Abstractionism is thus alive in the artist’s works: “chromatic emotions”, following the definition of his art Gard bestows upon us, are an intimate and personal journey into existence.Ferruccio Gard was born in Vestignè (in the province of Torino) in 1941. Since 1973, he has been living and working in Venice. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a protagonist of Optical Art. He is one of the best-known exponents of contemporary abstractionism, to which he has been dedicating himself since the 1990s. His curriculum vitae includes 140 solo exhibitions, among others in Prague, Kiev, Brussels and New York City. Like in 1982, 1986, 1995 and 2007, he is participating at the Venice Biennale again in 2009 (the 53rd edition of the International Art Exhibition): together with eight more artists, at a collateral event curated by Luciano Caramel, called “Port of Arts” and on display at the Church of Santa Marta.