GIANFRANCO CHIAVACCI
Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to present “Binarieta” by Italian artist Gianfranco Chiavacci. This is the second show by the gallery dedicated to the artist, focusing more specifically on his painting. The opening will be held Thursday June 20th, from 6 to 8 PM and the exhibition will be on view through July 26th, 2024. Sous Les Etoiles Gallery organized the first retrospective of Gianfranco Chiavacci in 2018, including his paintings, sculptures and photographs.
A self-taught and innovative Tuscan artist, Gianfranco Chiavacci (1936-20t11) was born in Pistoia, near Florence, where he lived and worked for all his life. Surrounded by exceptional artistic circles around Milan and Florence such as Fiamma Vigo’s Galleria Numero, notorious for its unmatched flavor for the avant-garde and kinetic, abstract and geometric art Chiavacci began his career as a painter in the 1950’s. Gianfranco Chiavacci has made binary language the foundation of his pictorial work and his experimental research. In 1962, after taking a programming course on IBM’s first computers, Chiavacci’s curiosity in this new form of language sparked. With aspects of optical and kinetic art, he began with making two and three-dimensional paintings experimenting with different materials creating geometric figures and forms, all the while never using the computer, but the binary logic that is inherent to it. This discovery of the binary language, drove him to experiment and develop an almost obsessive aesthetic in his work. He was absorbed in the middle of two important Italian movements of the 1960s, Arte Programmata and Arte Povera, which inspired him to create a style of his own.
Gianfranco Chiavacci was committed to exploring the continuous deconstruction of form followed by a reconstruction of a unique aesthetic. Tirelessly inventive and driven by an insatiable curiosity, he developed, over the course of his fifty-yearlong career, a poetically experimental artistry that deviated from the conventional rules of creation. His incredibly diverse and abundant production can be considered a study of abstraction. By intersecting the experiences of technology with the expression of abstract art, Chiavacci was captivated by the idea of exploring an origin and rebuilding it into an artwork.
Most prominent in his paintings, Chiavacci explores the experimentation of the binary logic. The idea of two-dimensionality is examined and occasionally extended within three-dimensional space, such as in piece GF0572 (1984) where the occurrences of three-dimensionality find their dissolution. Moreover, the juxtaposition of materials,threads and colors, all of them primary, despite the diversity of their function, have the same importance. These elements taken separately or in their entirety coexist according to pre-determinated rules and arithmetic equations. Each work appears as a programmed experience.
By intersecting the experiences of the binary language with the expression of abstract art, Chiavacci has demonstrated a pioneer vision seeking to decode this language by applying it in his paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures. Chiavacci’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around Italy since 1967. In 2015, a joint exhibition with French artist François Morellet, founding member of op-kinetic art research group G.R.A.V., titled Chiavacci Morellet, rigorosi, rigolards… was conceived as a dialogue between these two polymorphic artists.
