PARIS.- “Light found a new media: sicofoil and fluorescent colors. The painting no longer existed, because I made its structure visible, and made my signs anonymous” -Carla Accardi, Flash Art, 1989

With these words, Carla Accardi (1914 – 2014) discusses her choice of sicofoil, a malleable and transparent plastic material, as both subject and matter of her work. Delving further and further in her exploration of the representation of light, from the late 1960s until the mid 1980's, Accardi rejected the use of canvas to privilege instead the use of sicofoil to create both bi-dimensional works and sculptures.

To commemorate the artist’s 100th anniversary, MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique presents Trasparente, 1975, an iconic example of Accardi’s ambitious formal research.

Indeed, the beginnings of Carla Accardi’s artistic research were characterized by experimentation with canvas featuring black and white, tortuous signs. However, the 1960s brought about a, important turn in Accardi’s practice. Influenced by the Post-Painterly Abstraction movement born in America featuring artists such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella among others, the artist began experimenting with different combinations of color juxtapositions, abandoning her customary black-and-white palette. In doing so, she was guided by her interest in the possibilities provided by color to yield the immaterial nature and transparency of light.

The subject of light, and its unique qualities, became a crucial part of her artistic investigation, gradually imposing itself as one of the primary motives guiding her creative practice. In the artist’s own words: “more than colors I have always loved the way they match, as well as the light they give off. Even my white-black phase was a period of light […] The way colors struggle against one another creates light” (Accardi in A.M. Boetti, “Lo specchio ardente”, in Data, Milan, no.18, Sept.-Oct. 1975, p. 50).

From the 1960s onwards, light and the yearning for a transparent quality in her works informed Accardi’s practice more and more explicitly, reaching its epitome in her discovery of sicofoil.

Trasparente, shown in the artist's major retrospective at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome earlier this year, inserts itself in this specific trajectory of Accardi's artistic inquiry.

By weaving sicofoil strips around a bare wooden frame, Accardi not only aims to capture light itself through the utterly transparent texture of the work but also to transport the exterior environment into the piece. By shifting the attention from the artistic object to the surrounding context in which the artwork is inserted, it is emancipated from any formal static connotation and becomes susceptible to the shifting reality around it.

In Trasparente, the subject is not trapped or limited to the surface, but it is rather dynamic and ephemeral. For Accardi, sicofoil as both subject and medium allows to achieve the maximum negation of "painting" as understood in the traditional sense, as well as to allow the complete triumph of light as the protagonist of her work.

Carla Accardi (1924 - 2014) is one of the most important exponents of abstract painting in Italy after World War II. Born on October 9, 1924, in Trapani, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence before moving to Rome in 1946, where she founded the influential postwar group Form 1 (1947–51), the main reference for abstract art in Italy in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Her early paintings consisted of interlocking geometric forms. In the 1950s, Accardi was involved in the wide-reaching attempts to revolutionize abstraction through the hybridization of geometric and gestural painting, both in Italy and in France, where art critic Michel Tapié took an interest in her work. In 1953 Accardi began to introduce pseudo-calligraphic signs into abstract images, while reducing her palette to white-on-black compositions to explore the relationship between figure and ground.

In the 1960s, however, there is a rejuvenation of color in her works with references to the metropolitan culture and optical effects. Accardi’s artistic research was characterized by a continuous experimentation radicalized with the use of transparent plastic supports that accentuate the nature of the painting as a luminous diaphragm. In 1961 indeed, she began painting on sicofoil, a transparent plastic, instead of canvas. She showcased these new strategies at the 1964 Venice Biennale. By the mid-1960s, she was using these new materials sculpturally. This phase of Accardi’s oeuvre, which was celebrated in the Ambiente/Arte section of the 1976 Venice Biennale, would prove infl uential for Arte Povera. In the 1980s she returned to canvas and shift ed her focus to the use of signs and chromatic juxtapositions. In 1988 she participated again at the Venice Biennale, while in 1994 she took part to Th e Italian Metamorphosis 1943–1968, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1994.

Her work is part of many important collections, including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Castello di Rivoli (Turin), the Gallerie Civiche of Modena and Bologna, the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and the Museo Civico in Turin. Th e artist died in Rome on February 23, 2014.