Timeless
Painting captures its time and transcends it, living on beyond its era.
Thought is outside of time. It acts without yesterday, today, or tomorrow, without present, past, or future.
It is memory that anchors time and space.
Timeless.
We are capable of conceiving only an endless present.
Torino, November 6, 2024.
Giorgio Griffa
-
(excerpt from the exhibition leaflet)
With these words, Griffa challenges us to reimagine time not as a straight line but as a boundless space, capable of dwelling in an infinite present in constant dialogue with both past and future.
In his vision, painting is a process that does not culminate in a moment of creation. It remains open, unfinished, continuing to breathe beyond the historical time from which it emerged. Griffa is uninterested in anchoring a definitive narrative. His art probes that suspended dimension where signs live with an energy all of their own.
In the exhibition, this timelessness takes shape through the juxtaposition of works from the Golden Ratio cycle of 2016, which occupy a central position, with pieces from the Primary Signs and Contaminations cycles of 1976–1979. They are not traditional diptychs, but dialogues between canvases that meet and stand side by side, originating from different periods and cycles.
Ultimately, Griffa does not invite us to find answers but to pose questions. His canvases, suspended between order and chaos, time and timelessness, remind us that art is not an act of control but continuous engagement with the unknown. Like the golden ratio, painting folds back upon itself, without ever ceasing, offering us a present that may truly have no end.
