In the March 2018 issue of the magazine Frieze, the British artist Simon Starling dedicated an extensive visual essay entitled Tools to Giorgio Griffa: six beautiful large-format photographs, mostly in black and white, taken with an 8x10’’ large camera during a visit to Giorgio’s studio in December 2017. In this way, Starling intertwines his photographic research with Griffa’s pictorial practice. The result is an homage to the “lean economy” and the material force of the studio space, of the canvases and the tools employed by Griffa in his painting, and of his own work, which continues to question the space, time and essence of painting.
A fine text by Starling recounts how this visual essay continues a collaboration with Griffa that began after the discovery, in Japan, of a rare brush made with the hair of the Ama, the renowned women pearl divers. Starling writes: “I found the idea of making marks with the brush daunting but in May last year I found myself sitting with Giorgio at a dinner to celebrate his participation in the Venice Biennale and realised there and then that I should ask him to collaborate on the work. There seemed to be something in the nature of the brush that related to his measured yet exuberant (and often calligraphic) mark-making."
Excerpt from the article in Frieze
«When I arrived with my 8”x10’’ plate camera to photograph his studio in late December last year, I found a small trestle table sitting in the middle of the main space with a pile of neatly folded canvases sitting on it (Giorgio has used exclusively un-stretched, un-primed pieces of canvas, burlap and linen as supports for his paintings since the mid-seventies). This modest pile of no more than 30 cm in height was, I was told, the entirety of his up-coming solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre. [...] The slowness (exposures can last many minutes), insistent materiality and process-oriented nature of large format, silver-based photography seemed to rhyme with Giorgio’s painting-practice in ways that I hadn’t fully anticipated - even the camera’s gridded ground-glass focusing screen seemed to echo his paintings’ structuring folds. The resulting images are, I hope, a celebration of the lean economy and subtle materiality of Giorgio’s practice.»
Simon Starling
