Nomas Foundation presents Dario Passi’s exhibition PITTURA DI SEGNI / SEGNI DI PITTURA, a series of large canvases and small papers from the recent production of the artist. His research highlights the variety of the signs that appear in his oevres which expand throughout the whole space, its surfaces and its floors.
After abandoning architectural drawing and the academic constraints of being an architect, Passi began investigating the direct and self-reliant value of the sign. His practice intended revealing a new way of expression beyond figuration and abstraction re-connecting with Cy Twombly and Gastone Novelli’s area of poetic abstraction and sign. His gesture is a symbol of freedom conditioned only by the relationship he engages between thought, image and word.
Shapes, lines, muddles, partially chaotic and partially geometrically well-defined, are firmly grounded to the two-dimension of the canvas or the sheet, but are also related to the research of a beloved three-dimensionality. Aiming to free themselves from any type of structure, the works float on surfaces and are not stiffened by frames or supports. The canvases are fixed directly on the walls or simply placed on the floor in order to recreate the situation in which they have been generated inside the artist’s studio.
His great experience as an architect enables him to formulate a new language necessary not for designing real buildings but for evoking a whole new universe. Once the necessity of urban constructing has been eliminated, Passi explores the human mystery, always manifested by a repetition of signs. The visible world is replaced by visionary forms whose reiteration creates a new language.
The large works on canvas, on velvet, on felt or on paper are 11 in total, while the framed or unframed papers are 7, displayed together with a double series of small drawings, each including 60 sheets.
The exhibition is enriched by a video showing the artist at work.
A small catalogue devoted to Dario Passi with an introduction by Raffaella Frascarelli, and with essays by Maria Grazia Tolomeo, Ilaria Gianni, Teresa Macrì and Tiziana Musi, including the artist’s comment and a dedication by Giorgio Muratore will be presented.
Dario Passi’s works are part of the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou (Paris), Deutsches Architekturmuseum (Frankfurt), Frac Center-Val de Loire (Orléans), Macro (Rome) and they are included in several private collections.