Itinerario 109

Itinerario 109 1960

acrilico e filo su tela

90 × 130 cm

Declaration of poetics by Achille Pace 1960

The thread not only represents the objective reality, but it is also loaded of symbolic meanings.

It indicates logical discourse, measurement, uncertainty, stability, construction, relationship, relation, communication, life and death. It can express the plane, the concave, the convex, slowness, tension, space. It can be rational or irrational, static or dynamic movement, growth, end. The thread follows moment by moment our life and testifies, with its itinerary, to the dangers, frailty, rigour, strength, thinking in all its manifestations. The thread as an object is therefore outside us, but also has within us, in our subconscious, deep roots that in the end make us what we are.

We cannot deny living today a particularly uncertain historical moment.

Peace, freedom and our own life are uncertain, the future even more. Becoming aware of it does not mean adapting to it, but find the strength for free choices, necessary to oppose the dangers that threaten us.

I chose the thread as a significant element of my work towards the end of 1959. It was the time of the Informal. My interest was then to come out of its irrational tangle. The thread detached from it slowly at first, then more and more decisively. It arranged and dissolved from the objective and alienated gesture of the Informal. As matter, my thread maintains the same state of falling, of vague existence and indeterminacy as the Informal, but at the same time it aspires to a more conscious, less alienated, more logical and constructive existence: of course, within the limits of a reality that is still untransformed and full of contradictions, lacerations and mystifications. The thread is also loaded with the future that the conscious man tries to prepare today. My thread is one of the approaches to this possible future, because it considers the reality of this historical moment, characterised by the condition of work in general and the condition of people in particular. The individual, by becoming aware of the reasons for his choices and his work, becomes part of the processes of culture as a process of work and becomes, at the same time, a creator of a new culture. When art is such, it can make a valid contribution by indicating operational methods and moral choices.

Achille Pace was born in Termoli on June 1, 1923. He moved to Rome in 1935, where he met the masters of the Roman school. In 1955 he went to Switzerland for a long stay, during which he analysed the lesson of Paul Klee and of the German Expressionists.
Then he returned to Rome at the end of the 1950s to begin his artistic career, first in Informal art, then breaking away from it and adopting the poetics of the thread: “The sinuous but exact paths of the thread in the opaque and deserted fields of Pace's paintings weave the space on the relationship from one to infinity[1]" wrote art critic Giulio Carlo Argan.
From the 1960s, Pace felt the need to purify his language from any emotional or representational content. His surfaces were mainly white or grey tending to black, the canvas was dyed before being fixed to the frame. The threads took on serpentiform profiles, intertwining, winding, and then the artist added fragments of raw canvas from whose warp the threads are released, revealing the operation of subtraction of the material, beyond which there is a void. As L. Strozzieri writes: "his technique uses the point, the line, the hieroglyph, the stain, the scribble, the intertwining, with these means he draws up poetic itineraries, a 'diary of the soul'"[2].
In the 1960s, to the individualism of the artist, group work was proposed as a dimension of social nucleus and as a possibility of feedback and verification of artistic research. The artists Nicola Carrino, Gastone Biggi, Nato Frascà, Achille Pace, Pasquale Santoro and Giuseppe Uncini founded the Gruppo Uno in Rome in 1962, the critic Giulio Carlo Argan had supported this idea after a meeting with some of them in Termoli, on the occasion of the Premio Termoli in 1962.

This group was different from the groups operating in Northern Italy, standing at the end of an industrial process applicable to the art, but also from the painters of the Roman school, connected to American influences.The pictorial research of the exponents of Gruppo Uno offered a new grammar of formal and chromatic vision. According to critics Luciano Caramel and Patrizia Ferri[3], who curated an exhibition of the group in Termoli in 1998:
[The]"Gruppo Uno investigates the relationship between the artist and society and proposes the analysis of the processes of doing and seeing in its own particular field, that differs both from Gestalt and Op Art, and from Pop Art, through the use of primary geometric form and traditional and contemporary materials".

Achille Pace, starting from the 5th edition of the Premio “Castello Svevo” Termoli in 1960, became a leading figure in the development of the Premio Termoli and in the exhibitions at Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporanea, set up in 1978 in the former Church of Sant'Antonio, in the homonymous small square in front of the sea in the centre of Termoli.

Achille Pace died in Rome on 28 September 2021 at the age of 98.

[1] A. Pace, Itinerari, Il quadrato n° 41, Edigrafica Aldina s.p.a, Rome, 1977, p. 29.

[2] L. Strozzieri, Quattordici Artisti, Umbria editrice, 1982, p. 6

[3] L. Caramel, P. Ferri, Gruppo Uno 1962/1967. Gli anni ‘60 a Roma, Edizioni Joyce & co. Roma, 1998, p. 74.