Guest of Honor: Carlo Chiavacci
Biography
After working for years on documenting artworks for public and private institutions and of course for many artists, with important satisfactions, towards the end of the 1990s, I began to look with different eyes at the research that for dozens of years had been pursuing my father Gianfranco Chiavacci. I found in it more and more more and more insights into important reflections. I do not have a basic background on the subject of art, but as I delved with him into the origins of his research I slowly began to understand its immense artistic value thus expanding my knowledge of art, with a particular attention toward abstract art, both pictorial and photographic.
In the year 2000, with the passing of my mother, the dialogue with my father became gradually became more and more intense, and the desire to deepen it, promote it and enhance it. Today, after 15 years of absolute dedication to my father’s archive, I follow with friends the activity of Die Mauer gallery, which is committed to giving visibility to the artistic genius of Gianfranco Chiavacci.
About Gianfranco Chiavacci
He was born Dec. 1, 1936, and died Sept. 1, 2011, in Pistoia, the city where he always worked and lived. Interested in art from an early age, in the very early 1950s he began to painting. First as a simple self-taught artist observing the works of the past and then, attending exhibitions and increasingly the Tuscan art scene, drawing inspiration from those of contemporary. His early ones show an interest in the informal climate of those years and in the lesson of international abstractionism that he knows through catalogs and magazines. He approaches the experiences of visual and kinetic. In 1964-65, he began a relationship and collaboration on the theoretical level with fellow artist Fernando Melani, which will last until the latter’s death in 1985. In 1962, for work reasons, he began attending IBM courses for programming; this introduced him to scientific thought, which is reflected in his first attempts to borrowing computer language in painting.
The use of binary language, on the then mammoth electronic processors, and the study of its logic, found application as early as the first works of 1963, the assumption of Binary, defined by the artist himself “as a two-state logic (not to be not to be confused with duality or dualism) and as a technique – an instrumental process for creating and experimentally investigate the formal world pertaining to two-dimensionality becomes the foundational core of his theoretical and operational research until his last works in 2007, when he declares that he has reached to a conclusive state. The artist never used computers for the production of the generative works but the binary logic is inherent; thus his interest is not in the technique but in the thought that supports it. The works all range from painting, made with heterogeneous classical and experimental techniques, to three-dimensional works close to sculpture, from material experiments to interesting photographic investigations, from small booklets with a limited to episodes classifiable as mail-art