OPENING ON SATURDAY 15.03.2025 16H-20H
As part of its ongoing series of monographic exhibitions dedicated to the Daniel Cordier Collection, Galerie Christophe Gaillard presents a remarkable selection of works on paper, along with two large canvases by Gianfranco Baruchello.
Gianfranco Baruchello (1924-2023) was an Italian conceptual artist - painter, poet, and filmmaker. After studying law, earning a doctorate in economics, and pursuing an industrial career until 1959, he devoted himself entirely to art, particularly painting. Moving to Paris in the early 1960s, he became immersed in avant-garde artistic circles, rubbing shoulders with painter Roberto Matta and critics Alain Jouffroy, Robert Lebel, and Pierre Restany. During this period, he participated in various collective exhibitions and artistic events.
Baruchello created these works between May and August 1963, in the weeks following his very first solo exhibition in Rome (Galerie La Tartaruga, May 1963) and just before meeting Daniel Cordier in Paris in September. A year later, the dealer and collector introduced Baruchello’s work to the United States for the first time, exhibiting it at his New York gallery, Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, with an introductory text by renowned American art historian Dore Ashton.
Baruchello gave prominence to space, emptiness, and whiteness. Only a few minimal elements, highlighted by vivid patches of color, are arranged on the surface of the paper or canvas—proof of his exploration of a conceptual decentralization of space. Dore Ashton described his works as follows:
« Whatever Leonardo (da Vinci) may have meant when he said ‘painting is a mental thing’, […] Baruchello, a 39-year-old Roman painter whose interests in science and philosophy are readable in his work, belongs to a growing category of artists who move freely from the territory of written and spoken discourse to that of painting and colour. These artists attack the conventional boundaries of painting with their ‘mental’ concerns (it is true that Leonardo made many graphic representations of his scientific observations, but he did not consider them works of art. This generation does and can justify it). The artist as an intellectual is not a new entity but still can be questioned both for his ability to think and for his formal capabilities.”»
An activist, poet, filmmaker, painter, draftsman, and artist-farmer - ultimately unclassifiable - Gianfranco Baruchello was notably close to Marcel Duchamp (a decisive encounter in 1963 in New York that marked a turning point in his work), as well as to Alain Jouffroy, Gilles Deleuze, Italo Calvino, Mario Schifano, and Jean-François Lyotard. According to Nicolas Bourriaud, who curated his retrospective at Villa Arson in Nice in 2018:
«His work, an immense fresco pulverized into micro-details, presents itself as an assault on everything that is massive, continental, authoritarian.»
Gianfranco Baruchello (Livorno, 1924 – Rome, 2023) lived in Rome and Paris. Since the late 1950s, his explorations intersected with major western avant-garde movements, from Pop Art to Conceptual Art. He experimented with various media, including painting, film, installation, objects, sculpture, and performance. Baruchello participated in the Venice Biennale (1976-1980, 1988-1990, 1993, 2013) and Documenta in Kassel (1977, 2012). His works are held in prestigious collections, including those of MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and MAXXI in Rome, Italy, MACBA in Barcelona, Spain, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, CNAP and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the IAC in Villeurbanne, France.
