Rodolfo Aricò (1930-2002)

The totalising shape of four joined panels performs an irresistible optical trick in Rodolfo Aricò’s Oggetto non oggetto (Object non-Object). An irregular hexagon, illusionistically rendered in three-dimensional form, is conjured by the quartet of flat, blue surfaces. Chronologically working alongside 1960s minimalism, but enjoying a recent surge in popularity, Aricò’s work engages with phenomenological relationships between the objecthood of the painting and the perceptual field of the viewer. With this approach, the painting becomes a blank instrument of axonometric perspective, rather than a vessel for illusionistic pictorial space. Writing for a 1967 catalogue of Aricò’s work, Giulio Carlo Argan determined that ‘Aricò explores the boundary between object and image. What he would like to obtain is not the diverse consistency of the two fields but the line of demarcation, the critical point of passage from the state of the object to the state of the image and the contrary. So he looks for a sign which means both image and object’ (G. C. Argan, in Aricò 67, exh. cat., Galleria l’Attico, Rome, 1967, translated and reproduced in Rodolfo Aricò: Objects of Painting and Painting of Space, exh. cat., Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 2013, p. 27).