Me about myself

I was born in Milan, that I love … enough, where I still live and work.
After the middle school at Parini, just a tram stop over, I lived Brera as my home, from high school to academy, as a student and then as a lecturer for so many years, with meetings and exchanges with well-established artists and scholars and others in formation like me.
Milan of the 50s and 60s … between high school and Academy. My daily trips were between home and Brera.
Brera was not then the vast, luxurious, consumerist area that today extends tentacle and which for many visitors is only synonymous of daytime and nightlife without identity. This does not look like my Brera, that for me was more Braida (without Amarcord).
The Braida as “Field next to the city” was for me a sowing and harvesting field.
Field near the city that was beginning to be rebuild … Gio Ponti’s Pirellone, Bega, Velasca Tower of Rogers and so on.

In Piazza del Duomo, on the building in front the cathedral, the sacred and the profane, the triumph of reclame: the first neon advertising with the spiral of Amaro Cora rotating … kinetic. Then we reached the galleries, which were in the neighborhood of Brera with some rare stop for a tea with Guido Ballo in the nearby caffes … Rarely to Jamaica that was too much for painters who still split between Abstraction and Figure.

At Brera my story begins with my classmates (Boriani, De Vecchi, then Colombo and Anceschi) in the Funi classroom, where out of time, we first “informalize” our works.
Then we get interested in concepts of Space / Time relationship, talking between us and with Guido Ballo who studied and deepened the themes of Futurism. From the attention and exchange on these topics comes out the experience of the T Group (T = Time) who experiment the first attempts to represent these modern concepts with the Miriorama (thousand images) events.
I took part in the same interests and I started to examine with the “Tavole Magnetiche” the expressive variation of a surface using forms and elements with magnets, which allow to compare opposites, such as order / disorder, above / below, before / after, attraction / repulsion etc.

The game as a tool of knowledge; It’s an invitation to play with me, with my objects, with elementary concepts … The audience becomes an artist with me; Like me, touches, moves, acts, tests, experiments and knows.
Public involvement is at the heart of the T Group’s proposal, after much informal, contemplative and often self-referential arts, proposed in many galleries and now a bit breathless ….
“Please touch” …. The involvement to activate the artistic experience even in the public …. Is the proposal and the meaning of my “Tavole Magnetiche”.
The magnet of my childhood play “Magnetic Landscape” that I try unsuccessfully to stick on the table marble or on the wood or on the wall of the house where we were displaced, but they adhered only on the handle of the stove that sometimes burst.

Lucio Fontana in 1961 introduces one of the first Miriorama exhibitions of the T Group, at the Galleria la Salita in Roma with a text published on the invitation. Bruno Munari who followed the Group T from the very first experiences with attention and interest proposes and cares for the first exhibition of “Arte Programmata and Cinetica” supported by Adriano Olivetti in 1962.
Umberto Eco writes the text for the catalog of the exhibition that will pass from Milan to Venice, Rome, New York and other cities in the US.
Eco’s text helps us to understand our intentions and to give an “open” shape to our researches and experiences.

I start to make pages and pages and “by chance” a sheet bends … From the study of programming that requires precision and accuracy I recognize my increasing interest for CASE.
I try, I provoke the CASE that it creeps insistently in the folds of my “Extrapagine” with examples of interference, anomalies, perceptual disorder, “Scarto” (title of the exhibition at Studio Marconi in 1983). In the Early 70’s I have read “The Case and Need” of J.Monod, which my husband consulted for scientific research. The title fascinates me and I almost adopt it; With curiosity I face the reading of the easier pages close to my sensitivity. For this research on the Case, which I feel complementary to the program, or even embedded in the program, I exercise almost maniacally with simple and poor means. I come back to using the paper … as in the drawings, but still with more interest in the collage of my first attempts; Paper, carton, monolucid, cutter, to simulate with folds and refolds improper events, excluded from typographical and legatory perfection.
So the “If” of the doubt and of the eventual is highlighted, the possible … the bend imposes itself peremptory and consolidates in metal, even in large dimensions. Pages and pages, bend and fall back and with all my “if” I cannot explain myself.

At the same time, I am interested in the recovery of space, first in the “Assenze” and more in the “Spazi Potenziali” 1974/75, unstable balance tests produced by the possibility of moving frames that define portions of different and variable spaces.
The fold, full of implications, animates all the work that from “Extrapagine” go to “Meridiana” and “Gnomoni”. Gnomone is the sundial rod whose shadow on the surface marks the flow of time. In my work this concept translates into an empty and bent square perimeter that plays with the shadows that projects and deny the rigor of basic geometry.

The bend reappears and stands as a protagonist in the experience of “OH!” Which I choose as the title of a work of 1996.
The absolute perfection of circular shape altered by the fold, gives the emotion of simplicity elevated to meaning.
“Oh!” 1997 my empty exclamation … all in a hurry: four nails, three circles, two gestures, a nothing … and the amazement is intense.
“Oh!”, It expresses the wonder, my astonishment, the pleasant surprise for the sudden, unexpected vision of a thought that materializes itself satisfactorily.
But, is this sculpture?
Definitions as a painter or sculptor embarrass me, do not fit the expressions of contemporary art.
I have always invited students to distinguish between the sculpture occupying the space and the form of art that hosts the space. Fullness and emptiness, gravity and lightness … linearity and distortion, tensions and opposing forces that strive for balance.
Today I’m interested to move the attention to my current activity, which I still practice spontaneously in the daily routine with effort, but also with amused attention … At the bottom of my biographical notes I write: Grazia Varisco lives and works in Milan.
Yes, I’m alive and with conviction I’m still interested in trying, giving shape to an idea that when it comes insistently becomes irreplaceable.
From the initial period of Group T, “Programmed and Kinetics art”, without any predictions, are arose out the experiences that I define aftermath of a story that at that time wasn’t possible to imagine neither the aims nor the developments.
In new forms I have again focused my attention on Space / Time, Case / Program, and on the comparison of opposites … in renewed tension for a perceptive and active involvement of the spectator who I invite to share my attempts, observing, touching, moving … pushing the senses into a playful and participatory information exchange.

In 2001, in a test of perceptual ambiguity between inside and outside, an angular cut in the iron slab was forced into a long bar that pervades diagonally through the entire field of vision. The title: “Double,” which proposes a confrontation between the two parts, in front and behind, tries to appeal to soft tissues, to soften the rigid firmness of the work.
In the “Silenzi” 2005, in the framer workshop, so many different and overlapping passepartout … become the occasion for a pause of reflection on production that risks the habit of craft, for me, so many empty voices, variable, extensible, incolmable for the irreplaceable “superhuman silences” of poetry that inhabits art.
“3 R. RotoReteRossa” of 2006 highlights the perceptual experience of reading circular forms not defined by the continuous line. The different inclination of the grid, marks and separates the accosted shapes. All here, it’s just what you see.

“Filo rosso” of 2008 is a sign of continuity that goes through the experiences and that with surprise recognizes and emphasizes the pregnancy in the forms of doubt.
With ” Quadri comunicanti – Jar” I wanted to try another version of the Q.C., almost simulating a more fluid liquid transfer, using a different material: “Supermirror Steel”.
I have seen inexorably overwhelmed my old age! … More than Narcissus! In a rebellious motion I brushed the surface, and I still insisted with punches to vent and dampen the offense and while at the same time avoiding the public from the distraction of the reflection. Then, in raptus, I was surprised to recognize in this new version an unconscious tribute to Lucio Fontana.
The “Acciai” 2012 work is the content of “Quadri comunicanti” solidified, frozen, vacuum-packed. A liquid transfer that discovers, a glad content… almost satisfied.
Again, in a contradictory way, there is a perceptual fun that compares, doubts and plays, randomness and rule.

A rigid veil that veil or rather … reveals the surprise of vibration in light transparency. I still insist on this alignment experience.
The “If …” of the doubt, of the eventual, of the possible creeps delighted in my research experiences until I chose “If” as a title of my personal exhibitions in Milan 2012, Berlin 2014 and London 2015.
So the case that claims to be important, imposes itself as an element of dissension, inspiring and irreplaceable for me, and materializes in so many visual traps that accumulate and fills my studio and … also my mind.
Just to conclude, I would like to be able to express my feeling to have enjoyed a great privilege (I would like to know who to thanks) of which I have always felt responsible, especially for young people and many students, who sometimes reach me with words and signs of gratitude that touch me deep.
A great thank to all those present to whom I have been able to motivate the fortune of having left me to calamitate and … trap from the “beauty” and sometimes to have experienced “Stati di Grazia”!