“I campi arati hanno linee necessarie, le linee sono il percorso delle macchine sulla superficie. Queste linee viste dall’alto sono solo pittura. Le stesse linee necessarie dipinte negli Stripe Painting da Stella. Le stesse linee fotografate da Mario Giacomelli.” (Marco Cadioli)
“Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting.” (Preface to Stripe Painting -Frank Stella- Carl Andre from 16 Americans [Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959])
“A me interessano i segni che fa l’uomo senza saperlo” (Mario Giacomelli)
from the presentation of the show at Link Point, Brescia, 2014
In Necessary Lines, Marco Cadioli looks to the earth adopting the point of view of satellites, to focus his attention on the lines that man traces on the planet’s surface along his never-ending effort of appropriation of the natural landscape: “necessary” lines, according to the inspired definition coined by Carl Andre to describe Frank Stella’s paintings in a text from 1959 that has been seminal for Cadioli’s project:
“Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting […] Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting.”
Frank Stella’s modernist faith finds an impressive analogy in the satellite images of the plowed fields, where the tractor insists on the “necessary” lines of the field’s borders in the same way in which Stella’s brush followed the rectangular perimeter and the grid of the canvas: signs traced by man without thinking about their symbolic or aesthetic potential, but only following the internal economy of a monotonous, repetitive gesture, typical of the Fordist model of work; “signs traced by man without knowing about them”, like the ones photographer Mario Giacomelli documented by means of aerial photography.
