Gencay, Mira Brtka, Antonio Franchini
Gencay [Kasapçi], Mira Brtka and Antonio Franchini have in common neither past research nor present work, however, their work originates from the fact that painting does not justify itself anymore in relation to the representation of reality, but with specific activity defined by experience in the limits of vision.
Furthermore, I should say that the results of their paintings place the artist in relation to a culture, generally speaking abstract, that has developed the emancipation of the traditional figurative links, parallel to the „informal“. A culture that has centered its interests on the means of visual perception and the instruments of its articulation from [Victor] Vasarely to [Piero] Dorazio, from [Carla] Accardi to [Kenneth] Noland, from the late period of Kandinsky to [Jesús Rafael] Soto, etc.
Franchini has a curriculum particularly significant to that effect; his relation with the MAC [Movimento per l’arte concreta] group on Spacialism [Spazialismo] is well known. Gencay has has ten years of activity in this field and is already known in Rome for her one-man show at the „Salita“ which showed the Roman public her type of luminous optical analysis of space.
Brtka is having her first exhibition, after a career of film directing, an academical course in painting and a technical-artistic apprenticeship with the Japanese painter-critic Nobuya Abe.
We cannot find fore varied careers as far as the time of development as well as results are concerned. On the other hand, on viewing the work of these three artists, the perception of this diversity has not bewildered me. Rather, the exhibition proves itself to be ideally dialectic and rich in opposing problems.
I already know the works of Gencay and the phase represented in this occasion seems interesting to me: the painter has abandoned the technique disposed to concentric circles, lines and arches for the traditional brush work. But the focal point is always the fast mobilisation of the retina on the optical displacements hastened by relations of light-space, light-colour-space, strengthening and gestaltic principle that „anything traced on a piece of paper is like a stone thrown into a pond. It breaks the state of rest and mobilizes the space“.
Gencay now would like to investigate the optical luminous possiblity of space, free relation evocating an oriental mosaic tradition – to which the Turkish painter inevitably linked.
Brtka immediately brings to mind the names of the Japanese sculptor Tomonori Toyofuku and the painter Nobuya Abe, of whom with the latter she has studied. Her debut shows talent and intelligence regarding painting as well as revelations of structural elements, empty and full, of the matter. However, the painter seems already to have differentiated herself notably from Abe by a prevalent unforeseen attention devoted to plastic texture, even if, with typical feminine analytical sensibility, she pursues the significance of certain automatists of informal origin. But Mira Brtka has to experiment with the „inactual“ and the composition equilibrium revealed by the elegant precision of the above mentioned Japanese artists, is rightly dissaranged in her work. Aside from every possible technical and formal reference, Mira Brtka is evidently still searching to go deeper into her own personality.
As for the works of Franchini, Lucio Fontana has written two years ago: „Vibrant fragments of space. Horizontal shadows is the infinity. Small chromatic cubes, luminous symbols that refract into the atmosphere surrounding it… Mystical contemplation where the immense space appears like a precious jewel case of happy, harmonious equilibrium“. And with the usual shrewdness of the artist, the critic has succeeded to capture the essence in the works of the Bolognese painter, the symbolic-iconographic pursuit, other than plastic, of an equilibrium which alludes to universal harmony. The surfaces painted in a uniform way are plowed by circular elements with concave and convex concentrics and, sometimes, by little rectangular tashes that remind the efforescence of Rothko.
The purity by which the painting is divided into zones of different colours is in relation to a complex problme of equlibrium between netted lines and curves, between forms and colours that have interested the painter since 1951. And every time Franchini solves this problem, he frees himself from all the bounds of iconography.
Source: Marisa Volpi, Gencay, Mira Brtka, Antonio Franchini, catalogo della mostra, Galleria Scorpio, Roma 18 settembre-10 ottobre 1964.