Footnotes

This work is registered in the Archivio Gianni Colombo, Milan, under no. 1198, and is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity.

Provenance
Studio Dabbeni, Lugano (no. 2094)
Galleria Giuli, Lecco
Private Collection, Venice
Studio Casati, Merate
Valmore Studio d'Arte, Venice
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires; Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Latinoamericano, Percezione e Illusione: Arte Programmata e Cinetica Italiana, 2013-2014, p. 121, illustrated in colour



Only now is Gianni Colombo finally being recognised as one of the giants of Italian Post-War Art. A pioneering figure who co-founded the influential Gruppo T movement with Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, and Gabriele Devecchi in 1959 his work has held as its central mission the exploration of space and light through the delicate balance of contrasting materials. Spazio Elastico, 1974, can be seen as a signature example from his most confident period in the early 1970s and yet it goes beyond the traditional formal structure of his works in this series. Present are the elastic lines that suggests an ethereality that reminds the viewer of constellations and supernatural force lines, held within the immovable fastness of the black frame. In the present work the elastic is delicate creating a slightly twisted grid that only intensifies the feeling of tension, of something infinite being anchored out of sight and recalling the dialectics of Piet Mondrian and of course the grid works of François Morellet. There is also a clearly defined relationship between the great Venezuelan Op artists Jesús-Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez, explored to such great effect in 2013 in Buenos Aires in the seminal exhibition Arte Programmata e Cinetica Italiana, in which the present work was featured and illustrated.

Colombo made great efforts to challenge and indeed subvert the concept of an artwork as an object merely to be contemplated; whilst his pieces were not interactive in a performative sense, they subtly invited the viewer to challenge their own ideas of space and reality by using a frame that also functioned as a hinged box which allowed the viewer to open the composition and as it were inhabit the artist's inner world. Through the use of emerging technology, radical in the period, the process of engaging with an artwork suddenly became an active experience rather than a passive one.

Experiments with time, space and support using new media and radical philosophy was a guiding credo that united the artists who showed at the hugely influential Azimut Gallery in Milan including titans of European Post-War art Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, Dadamaino, Paolo Scheggi and the other members of Colombo's Gruppo T. Colombo's works frequently operated on the principle of autonomy, requiring the audience to initiate a process that led in unexpected directions, freeing each interaction from objectivity and creating a very personal relationship between the individual and the exact moment of experience: "I've always said that my works have the character of a self-test. They weren't made to obtain information, but to emancipate the viewer from his state of perception, making him aware of what concerned him," (the artist in an interview with Jole De Sanna published posthumously in 1995.)

The ambitions of the artist were not limited merely to interacting with the viewer in a purely visual or even sensory manner but to challenge their very spatial understanding; the geometric lattice of the elastic created a negative effect which left the viewer unsure of the relationship between presence and absence within the confines of the frame, a very specifically disorientating process. It is no surprise perhaps then that the artist was given a special award at the Venice Biennale in 1968 for this very series.