Incavo Plastico 1973

Curator: Galliano Mazzon’s "Incavo Plastico," painted in 1973, presents us with a striking exploration of form executed in acrylic. Editor: It's arresting, isn't it? The contrasting black and white shapes against that golden ochre background create a compelling tension. A somewhat rigid, totemic quality strikes me immediately. Curator: Mazzon worked within the currents of geometric abstraction, embracing hard-edge painting. The painting should be understood within broader late modernist explorations of geometric form and chromatic interaction. In Italian art during this time, the social and political context had begun to open considerably. Editor: True, the work is definitively born of its moment, a pure and deliberate arrangement of geometric form. We have black diamonds stacked vertically, bisected by triangles, hovering within a muted yellow frame. What's especially compelling is the sharpness, that precision with which these elements intersect, which has a somewhat aggressive formalism. Curator: Looking at this arrangement through an intersectional lens, you might consider the dialogue between visibility and erasure. The stark geometry interacts in ways that the painting is not simply the reduction of everything to line and hard edge: it engages and challenges, with geometry a symbol of rigid structures but open to new relationships. Editor: Absolutely, and from a formalist perspective, the simplicity becomes a strength. Mazzon limits the color palette and compositional elements—and through that constraint, emphasizes the critical relationship between line, shape, and ground. Semiotically, we might decode those stark lines as representative of larger concepts or orders. Curator: Consider, too, that the Italian art scene during the 1970s grappled with legacies of Futurism but was opening to feminist ideas. The rigid lines, even the limited palette, do create an intense interaction that’s impossible to ignore as you consider questions of gender or identity, even those are deliberately obscured in abstract expression. Editor: Yes, a piece that seems on the surface about structure and geometric pattern, then, opens up surprising complexity with an interplay of shade, space, and striking form, a moment of frozen, yet intense interaction. Curator: And through the tensions, an expression of form, in a space that opens up new ideas.