About a Tent: Accardi, Torino, Notizie

Abstract

Carla Accardi’s Tenda was first exhibited at the solo show that the artist held at the Galleria Notizie in 1966. In Turin Accardi had found a lively, open, and international cultural milieu, and a positive dialogue with several young artists, particularly with Giulio Paolini and Luciano Fabro, and Tenda presents significant thematic affinities with works by her younger friends. There is a similar interest in the act of seeing: in particular, as in Fabro and Paolini, the phenomenological experience of space relies on a device that filters and organizes vision, in dialectic with the mobile and aleatory quality of the gaze. However, Tenda is also an environment, a space installed within a space, that of the gallery, verified in its “concrete situation” (C. Lonzi), as it will happen in Paolini’s Lo Spazio or Fabro’s In-Cubo. My paper also aims to reconstruct the web of relationships that Tenda establishes with other aspects of contemporary artistic experience: the environments of Lucio Fontana, the US post-painterly abstraction, and, to some extent, the work of Pinot Gallizio. Tenda’s unprecedented dimension in the context of Italian art, however, is that of gender. it reveals itself in its reference to the themes of subjectivity and domestic space (G. Zapperi) and is evident in the repetitive and patient gesture that decorates the transparent ‘walls’, “a liberating record of a [female] condition”, says the artist, at the antipodes of the exemplary quality of male gesture.