(Rome 1927–2005 Perugia)
Ogni tanto, 1957, signed and dated; signed, dated, titled and stamp Piero Dorazio on the reverse, oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm, framed

This work is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity signed by the artist

Provenance
Piero Dorazio Collection (Stamp Studio Dorazio, n. 371)
European Private Collection

Literature:
M. Volpi Orlandini, Dorazio, Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, Venice 1977, no. 231

For me, colour is a tool, not a means of expression -
a means between me and something else. I’m not colour,
and I don’t impersonate it like Pollock did.
Piero Dorazio

The ability of lines and colours to express feelings, to assert their own relevance regardless of the object they represent, are the topics at the center of nineteenth century aesthetic research. For the artists working in these years, colour is no longer a mere outline of form but a vehicle of sensation and expressive potential.
Piero Dorazio is undoubtedly one of the most authoritative protagonists of this turning point in painting.

The formative influence of the architecture lessons the Roman artist took for four years before turning to painting echoes throughout his production and also emerges in this early work. In Ogni tanto, dated 1957, Dorazio places the viewer before an act of liberation and artistic evolution in which colour stands as a definition of space, exalting itself without ever falling into decorative temptation. 

In all his painting the compositional scheme is subverted through the crisis of the closed form, and it is colour that dynamically structures the space. As Claudio Cerritelli, art critic and historian, explains, “the constructive value of the composition determines fields of tension commensurate with the vertigo of unstable balances. The work is a luminous score that follows the continuous pulsing of space, the vibrations of colour are rhythms projected towards other channels, their dynamic flow reveals inner sounds, oblique resonances of the signs, textures of thought that slide from pictorial discipline.” This is an idea that his friend Giuseppe Ungaretti expressed as early as 1966, describing Dorazio’s works with the following words: “in those fabrics or rather membranes of his, which are of a uniform nature, almost monochromatic and also interwoven with diverse threads and rays of colour, the cavities within the honeycomb rents open, guardians of pupils redolent with light, armed with stingers of light.”

Dorazio’s canvases are executed by means of thin brushstrokes that intersect and overlap, creating a pictorial texture that lets invisible corpuscles of luminous tones filter from its pores.
This pictorial research finds in great masters such as Mondrian and Severini points of reference. Whilst inheriting Mondrian’s compositional rigour, Dorazio shares Severini’s interest in grasping the ephemeral effect of light which through refraction makes vision possible and causes the consequent transformation of colour into light. “Light - according to the artist - is not only a physical phenomenon, but also a psychic and biological one that has nothing to do with reason and that is perhaps produced by forms of mutation or expansion of energy in cosmic spaces. Both light and half-light, shadow and darkness provoke particular states of mind. Because of this, light is an essential component of the means of expression in the visual arts.” 

His painting is a starting point for a revision of classical abstraction: Dorazio’s approach is not of the haptic-expressive type he considered too far from the compositional rigour and rhythmic interconnections of ‘forms’ that characterise his pictorial research.
The period from the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s was when Piero Dorazio’s painting, influenced by his time in the USA and by his contact with the artistic experiments of De Kooning, Rothko and Pollock, conquered the idea of surface as a continuous field. A surface within which the autonomous force of colour, space and the form of light reverberated, highlighting all those elements that would, from that moment onwards, become the distinctive feature of Dorazio’s style.