Art, Culture & Lifestyle
STEFANO FOSSATI DIRECTOR ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE HONG KONG & MACAU
Optical art
MARINA APOLLONIO, CIRCULAR DYNAMICS N, 1968, ENAMEL ON WOOD WITH ROTATING MECHANISM, 86 X 86 CM.
AND ITS INTERACTION WITH “USERS”
Most people are used to associating the CIA, the 75-year-old “world’s premier foreign intelligence agency”, with political issues (coups d’état, counterterrorism actions, etc.) but few people know that the CIA played a role in moulding what Joseph S. Nye defines as the “soft power” of the USA. That is, the ability of a country to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion. Soft power is something close to “invisible power” that Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci defined as “hegemony”.
Expressionist painting worldwide for more than 20 years.”
In a provocative article published in The Independent (Sunday 22 October 1995), Frances Stonor Saunders writes, “For decades in art circles, it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used modern American Art including the works of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract
Optical Perspective, the exhibition that Novalis Art Design presents during Art Central Hong Kong 2022, offers a rare opportunity to increase our knowledge of modern art and admire masterpieces by artists from the Optical Art movement.
The American artists supported by their government would have certainly played a fundamental role in global art history. This was also the case in the Italian Renaissance. After all, without Pope Julius II we could not admire the Sistine Chapel as it is now. But it is also true that the treasure hunt is still open in the complex scenario of contemporary creativity.
“Optical Art,” writes Vera Canevazzi, curator of the exhibition whose representing artists come from a variety of experiences, “develops between the mid-1950s and the end of the 1960s, placing itself in continuity with the geometric/abstract experimentations of
the historical avant-garde movements at the beginning of the 1900s, such as Futurism, Constructivism and the school of Bauhaus whose instances were adopted by ‘kinetic’ artists through a renewed study of the relation between art, psychology and technology.” Italian society, at that time, was undergoing a profound transformation and development due to the “Economic Miracle”. In that period (1958-63), “growth rates reached a level never previously attained in the history of the unified state, an average annual increase in GDP of 6.3 per cent. [...] Industrial production more than doubled [...], with the engineering industry and petrochemicals leading the way. Above all, exports became the driving sector behind the expansion, with an average increase of 14.5 per cent per annum. The effect of the Common Market was clear for all to see: the percentage of Italian goods destined for the EEC countries rose from 23 per cent in 1955 to 29.8 per cent in 1960 and 40.2 per cent in 1965.” (Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition, p. 214).
