Reticolo

“Forms of pure, lyrical invention interweave and overlap to the rhythm of emotion, creating a space that is poetic space” – so wrote Palma Bucarelli, director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, in her introduction to the vast one-man room dedicated, for the first time, to Turcato at the Venice Biennale. The works displayed included the artist’s recent “reticulum” series, compositions like the one shown here in which, on a uniform background colour, in the absolute foreground the viewer sees a set of dancing serpentines and nodes of elongated, stretched signs, as if they were seeking their origin or their destiny outside the canvas.
Now, in mid-decade, Turcato was a fully mature artist. He had abandoned the group solidarity that had drawn him to adhere, albeit with detachments and deviations, to the main post-war Italian art groups (Fronte, the Group of Eight, and others). Alone, he now embarked on his own, utterly personal path towards a lyrical, joyous abstraction, sometimes tempted by a quasi-surreal inflection and veined with irony, that would make him one of the most important, and certainly one of the least predictable, of Europe’s mid-century colourists.