The point about one of the greatest exponents of Programmed Art
Whether it depends on his character or his Piedmontese roots, Claudio Rotta Loria has always stood on the fringes of showbiz, despite his long career as a programmed artist, which started 50 years ago. This self-effacing man took a secluded and silent road dominated by the study of the interferences of light with space fields. At the beginning of his career, Rotta Loria – also due to the period in which he was born – could not avoid being influenced by Kinetic and Optical art. However, such influences were slight and did not play a major role in the creation of the guidelines for its work, which consist in “penetrating and sounding the depths of the systems that regulate and support the interactions between light and spatial fields, even the most intimate ones, (...) to become able (...) to identify (...) the moment when light materializes and becomes trace and vector, structural component and space for life.” (Giovanni Granzotto).
ALWAYS ON THE FRINGES OF SHOWBIZ,
HE HAS BEEN CONSTANTLY PURSUING AN INTEGRATION BETWEEN ART AND SCIENCE
To pay tribute to his long career – they will be 55 years at the beginning of the next year –, from January 14 to February 28, 2021, the monumental complex of San Salvatore in Lauro in Rome hosts a large retrospective. In addition to retracing the career of one of the most important exponents of programmed art in Italy, the exhibition will also draw a comparison between the Rotta Loria’s work and that of another great master of this genre, US artist Gilbert Hsiao. The exhibition retraces Rotta Loria’s career through
30 works dating from the 1980s to the present, and is focused on Superfici a interferenza luminosa (“surfaces with light interferences”, 1996), although it also features more recent works that are characterized by an increasingly dense and sustained warp.
IN HIS WORKS PERCEPTUAL IMPULSES GO BEYOND VISION
In this exhibition, the vibrations of light that traverse, cross, stimulate and blend the surfaces of Rotta Loria’s spatial fields converse with the slashes of light and/or colour that plastically build, in an alienating perceptual dimension, Gilbert Hsiao’s large family of formal epiphanies, in a sort of endless succession of mutual references between the second and third dimensions.
Rotta Loria constantly reinvented the pictorial space with a few – apparently simple – interventions. He loves to play on minimal surfaces – where minimalism has little to do with the minimal art of the 1960s and a lot with the lightness of a slight lifting of the planes – carrying out that investigation into the light-surface relationship that allowed him to seize the secrets of virtual form, interpreted as plastic vibration.
IN JANUARY APPOINTMENT AT THE MONUMENTAL COMPLEX OF SAN SALVATORE IN LAURO, ROME
His artistic research, which unfolds in interconnected cycles of works whose experimental nature is in constant evolution, preserves the uniform features of an all-encompassing project that is permeated by a constant process of synthesis, as well as by the effort to integrate the idioms of art and science, with visual structures on one side and the poetic value of geometry on the other. This also applies to his large permanent installations, especially to those he created during the 1980s and 1990s. Wherever he moves (even in new spaces), Rotta Loria “continues keeping with him (...) light geometries and perceptual stimuli and impulses that constantly go beyond vision to convey evocative and subliminal messages to us”.
