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“The crowds captured me in the starry sky as much as in the gravel of the garden,

in the crowds of people in the square as well as in the conglomerates of granite

or moss on the stones;

I found it in the images of Latin sarcophagi,

in the battle scenes of the Renaissance,

in the representations of the Brueghel or Ensor,

in all full of Gustav Klimt, Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock,

in the pages of certain comics.”

(Lucio Pozzi, March 2021)

Lucio Pozzi (Milano, 1935) is an artist who during his long artistic career met the American avantgardes with whom he shared the experiments between the Sixties and Seventies, having moved to New York at that extremely fertile moment.

Polyhedric and coherent, volcanic and rigorous, Pozzi is a master of great theoretical value and inexhaustible productive prolificacy. Tireless experimenter of techniques and languages, his early works reflect the great European artistic currents – cubism, surrealism, metaphysics – on which he subsequently grafted his knowledge of American artists and movements, from Abstract Expressionism to New York School, from Conceptual Art to Fluxus, with an artistic approach that actually transcends the notion of style, in the conventional sense of the term, to arrive at an eclectic but intimately and undeniably coherent research that rejects strict criteria and labels.

“The ultimate goal of my enterprise – says the artist – is to reach the maximum intensity in every single work. I feel that the temperature of my commitment increases if I feel independent of any definition and also i think that the viewer can dive look without hesitation in every work of mine, creating it in its own terms without looking for the reasons.”

This exhibition presents the most recent production of works belonging to the Color Crowd group, a series born in the Nineties, but which, like all his “families” of works, cyclically returns. “I never stop committing myself to the families of my works. Not only do I return to each one in turn but they also intertwine and contaminate without even my noticing.”

They are works consisting of large fields of oil paint, first painted with two quick glazes of very diluted acrylic paint thrown with large brushes on the canvas laid on the floor; then hanging the canvas on the wall, Pozzi intervenes with the slower oil painting. The process is highly improvised; the unintentional acrylic stains offer the artist many ideas but in the same way he also finds unexpected images, like a swing between the conscious and the pre-conscious.

Throughout his artistic life, he has preferred themes such as crowding or dispersion rather than stylistic definition, assuming that the painter’s mental and physical handwriting cannot fail to reveal itself spontaneously, without him predetermine the conditions.