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GIULIO CARLO ARGAN 1991

Dear Gubinelli,

         So many others have written so well about your work that my regret is less for not writing about contemporary art for many years now. I will therefore not speak about your work, which I continue to follow with interest, but I would like to understand the sense of your declared search for "analytic rationality" which interests me for two reasons. I remain a rationalist though acknowledging that some of the criticisms the post-moderns make at rationalism are not unfounded. Your declaration about rationality interests me precisely because the traces of the traditional iconography of rationality are rare in your work. Your rationality therefore seems to me not deductive, logical, but instead inductive. To find a dimension of the rational beyond logic is precisely what I have always looked for in works of art. I have read what you wrote on the quality of space-light that you see in white paper which is not a working surface for you but instead, formal substance. I feel that your quest is to dematerialise or dephenomenalise paper, removing its limit as a surface and, by means of fine cuts, construct spatiality without volume and light without rays. In brief, you reduce material and visual facts to immaterial rigor, rational quality. Your rationality therefore consists in attributing geometric value to signs which are not canonically geometric. If I am not mistaken, it is a way to contest the claim of rationality which is so much in fashion today. Naturally, the intellectual content of your work does not lie here alone, but I believe that this is a constant in your persistent intention to make spirit of geometry coincide with spirit of fineness.

Rome, April 25, 1991                                                                                                Your friend

                                                                           G.C. Argan

Antologica Ed. Università degli Studi di Camerino

Palazzo Ducale - 1991 - Camerino

Antologica Ed. Università degli studi di Camerino

Palazzo Ducale - 1991 - Camerino

Paolo.Gubinelli@inso.it

giosue@giosuemarongiu.it

www.giosuemarongiu.it

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