Lucio Pozzi ‘zigs and zags’ at Magazzino
For robust 90-year-old artist Lucio Pozzi, mixing and matching, “zigging and zagging” and getting lost in the process is a fruitful recipe for creativity. At his new exhibit, In Here, at Magazzino Italian Art in Philipstown, a handwritten menu he titled “Inventory Game” lists around 140 concepts and techniques.
Created in 1968, “when everyone declared painting to be dead,” he says, the menu directs artists to “mix ingredients at will” and transcend artificial constrictions.
Suggestions on approach include wings, relief, handmade, freehand, directed hand, mass producible, personal memories and to be walked around. There are conceptual directives like static, satyric, allusive, axiality, deceleration, randomness, long duration, short duration and hard political propaganda. Masonite is an approved material.
“How you mix things is the art — it’s not what goes in,” Pozzi says, standing in Gallery 8 on March 7, which was opening day.
Born in Italy, Pozzi moved to Manhattan in 1962 and occupied a front-row seat for the establishment and evolution of contemporary avant-garde art movements like Fluxus, minimalism, abstract expressionism and Arte Povera, the latter being the focus of the museum’s permanent collection.
Pozzi moved to SoHo before it became an artistic mecca, helped launch art journals (October is still published), taught at several universities, including Princeton, and rubbed elbows with fellow travelers Hans Haake, Dick Higgins, Joseph Kosuth and Nam June Paik.
Beyond sculpture, photography and paintings that include abstract and figurative subjects, he created performance-art pieces. For “Paperswim,” Pozzi dressed in a leotard and strapped on blinders to dive into 8-foot piles of unspooled, crumpled newsprint.
“Instead of painting on the material, I dove into it, emerging like Venus from the sea every two minutes” to mark on the paper, he told The Brooklyn Rail in a recent interview. The sessions lasted eight hours.
At the Museum of Modern Art, Pozzi curated a showcase with works by Picasso, Mondrian and Newburgh-born Ellsworth Kelly that reflected his interest in dualities and helped coin the academic phrase “radical pluralism.” The Kelly display paired an abstract with a flower drawing.
A similar dichotomy at the Magazzino exhibit is represented by three compact landscape watercolors completed between 1981 and 2015 that are dwarfed by two abstracts and a smaller work with a similar motif.
As he selected older pieces and worked on site-specific installations for the Philipstown exhibition, Pozzi says he listened to music by Bach and Rage Against the Machine.
The artist treated the airy gallery as a cavernous canvas and climbed ladders to hang works 40 feet in the air. The show includes two rectangular texture studies, “4 of 40 Planets” and “Small Level Blueyellow Upfront (HLR).”
One standout painting, “Darkness of the Soul,” is part of his Rug Rag series. He created the ragged texture with at least 1,000 close cuts with a palette knife. The result resembles a collage or a patchwork quilt.
Today, Pozzi splits his time between Valeggio, Italy, and a studio in Hudson that he bought decades ago after his real-estate agent advised him that it represented a once-in-a-lifetime bargain.
Pozzi says he enjoyed the exhibit’s focus on abstracts but demurred about potential impact. “I like to quote the great art historian Erwin Panofsky: ‘The symbolic value of a work of art seldom, if ever, corresponds to the intentions of the artist.’ ”
Coming from the do-it-yourself school, he also evokes his favorite anti-dogma catchphrase: “No rules, but tools.”
Magazzino, at 2700 Route 9 in Philipstown, is open Friday to Monday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $20 ($10 seniors, students, disabled visitors; $5 ages 5 to 10; free for ages 5 and younger and Philipstown residents). In Here continues through June 23. See magazzino.art.
