The discovery of a nucleus of works created by Laura Grisi (1939, Rhodes – 2017, Rome) between 1961 and 1965 has provided the occasion to rethink the artist’s creative parabola through the lens of a coherence that critical literature had until now struggled to recognize. The exhibition The Endless Diagram, the artist’s second solo show in the spaces of P420 gallery curated by Marco Scotini, puts early works in dialogue with some conceptual works from the seventies to reveal how the so-called “diagrammatic thought” that will characterize Grisi’s maturity was already fully operational from her first pictorial experimentations. This methodological approach, which proceeds through schemes and multiple translations of reality, traverses the artist’s entire production as a radical strategy to deny the univocality of the real and to open the space to the infinite combinatorial possibilities concealed behind the apparent solidity of things.
Laura Grisi, “The Endless Diagram”, installation view at P420, Bologna, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy P420
The two halls of the gallery construct a path that proceeds through chronological juxtapositions, making the pictorial works presented in the artist’s first solo exhibitions at Il Segno gallery in Rome (1964), at Studio Errepi in Bologna (1964) and at Ariete gallery in Milan (1965) coexist alongside enlarged archival photographs portraying the young Grisi at work and works from the seventies that make explicit what in the early works remained partially concealed beneath the pictorial surface. The very first canvases from 1961 such as Senza titolo and Parentesi show irregular fields of earthy, blue and orange tonalities floating on gray backgrounds. The surface results fractioned into paintings within the painting according to a logic that anticipates that permutational seriality that the artist will develop in a systematic manner in the following years. Already here emerges the idea that the image originates from the multiplication of points of view and that every representation contains within itself the possibility of decomposing into autonomous subunits capable of generating new visual constellations.
Laura Grisi, “The Endless Diagram”, installation view at P420, Bologna, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy P420
The decisive passage occurs in 1964 when documentary photography, which Grisi had practiced intensely between 1958 and 1963 alongside her husband Folco Quilici travelling worldwide, re-enters the pictorial work according to modalities that reveal its tautological nature. The large canvases from that year incorporate allusions to the photographic medium within complex geometric architectures in which flat fields of color coexist with pencil-drawn diagrams, written notations and cut-out images. The photographic collage subtracts itself from the documentary function to become an element of a combinatorial system that translates the same information through different codes. Some work titles, such as Fish-eye lens (1965), Wide Angle (1965) and Teleobiettivo (1965), referring explicitly to the optical devices of the photographic camera, indicate how the artist conceives the act of seeing as a technically mediated operation that produces different realities depending on the instruments employed. In these works the central pictorial allusion to the photographic negative is surrounded by diagrammatic structures that mark its perceptual genesis, as if Grisi wanted to make visible the conceptual apparatus that presides over the construction of every representation. In Grande Reflex (1964) the synthesis seems to reach maximum conceptual and poetic essentiality: a central circle traversed by undulating lines, probable allusion to the Polynesian atoll where the artist lived for a year recounting her experience in the ballad I denti del tigre (1964), stands out on a background made of broad bands of cartographic azure, at the bottom of which smaller modular pictorial images evokes a sequence of underwater photographs. The diagram that marks the pictorial plane here becomes autonomous aesthetic form, structure that orders the visible while openly declaring its own character of artifice, of mental scheme superimposed on the chaos of experience.
Laura Grisi, “The Endless Diagram”, installation view at P420, Bologna, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy P420
In the second hall the works from the seventies make explicit the theoretical premises that already animated the early works. Drawing for Time (1975) is a sequence of twenty papers, in each of which diagrams, photographs and mathematical calculations coexist according to a logic of multiple translation. The photographs portray chronometers that register the passing of time, the diagrams translate these measurements into geometric structures, of which the calculations offer the arithmetic version. Each element of the work represents a different modality of capturing the elusive flowing of seconds, as if Grisi wanted to demonstrate that the temporal dimension manifests itself only through the interpretive grids that we superimpose on it. Ipotesi sul tempo, a diptych of papers from the same year, proposes an analogous reasoning presenting on one page the schematic representations of the chronometers that on the other appear photographed in three different moments and accompanied by formulas that calculate their relations. The work, translating into pure algebraic language what the photographs showed in sensible form, incarnates an ecology of the possible in which every phenomenon is investigated in the multiplicity of its virtual manifestations.
Laura Grisi, “The Endless Diagram”, installation view at P420, Bologna, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy P420
Perhaps the most rigorous work of the exhibition is Infinito (1977), a parchment sheet entirely covered with ink writing in which the artist obsessively transcribes mathematical formulas relative to the divisibility of space. The density of the graphic trace transforms the text into pure visual texture. Grisi here seems to want to materialize the impossibility of exhausting through algebraic notation the vertiginous opening of the infinite, as if the proliferation of signs on the page mimicked the inexhaustibility of what one seeks to describe. The reasoning underlying this work, based on an impossible saturation of a circumscribed portion of space, appears complementary to one of the artist’s masterpieces, the film The Measuring of Time (1969) which showed her intent on counting the grains of sand on a beach to mime the absurdity of wanting to reduce the infinite to numerable quantity. Laura Grisi’s diagrammatic thought is thus specified in this excursus of works as a paradoxical effort to capture the unlimited through finite procedures and to make visible the invisible by multiplying the partial translations that offer always incomplete versions of it.
Laura Grisi, “Ipotesi sul tempo”, 1975, ink and photo collage on paper, dyptich, cm 34.5×50, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy P420
Hypothesis about Time (Ipotesi sul Tempo) (1975), the large photographic mosaic that occupies the back wall, is an installation composed of three hundred sixty photographic tables that explore all possible permutations of three temporal instants: one second before, the present, one second after. Grisi here starts from the premise that the categories of past, present and future through which we organize the experience of time are mental constructions rather than objective data, and that their reciprocal relation can generate a finite but vertiginous number of combinations. Each photographic table documents a different configuration of the temporal triad, as if the artist wanted to exhaust all the modalities in which these three moments can arrange themselves one with respect to the other. The ensemble of the three hundred sixty variants constitutes a sort of atlas of the combinatorial possibilities of time, chimerical attempt to capture the fluidity of duration through the fixity of photography and the rigor of mathematical permutation. The work transforms time from continuous flow into discrete set of manipulable elements, demonstrating how even the temporal dimension of existence lends itself to that analytical decomposition that Grisi applies to every aspect of reality.
Laura Grisi, “The Endless Diagram”, installation view at P420, Bologna, ph. Carlo Favero, courtesy P420
The criticism from her time had struggled to place Grisi within the available categories, variously labeling her as exponent of Italian Pop Art, Op Art or Programmed Art. This difficulty derived from her peculiar border position between painting and conceptualism, between image and system, between aesthetics and epistemology. The discovery of the corpus of early works presented in this exhibition permits today to reread her creative parabola in light of that methodological coherence that contemporaries had mistaken for eclecticism. From the painting of the beginnings up to the environmental installations of the seventies in which she artificially reproduced natural phenomena such as wind, fog and rain, Grisi pursued the same objective: to demonstrate that reality always gives itself through mediations, that every perception is already interpretation and that behind the apparent solidity of the world opens a field of combinatorial possibilities to which mathematical language can only approximate, without ever exhausting them. The cosmology that emerges from her work refuses the idea of an objectivity accessible through neutral observation since every measure produces the reality it pretends to describe and every scheme imposes its own categories on the continuum of experience. The artist seems to suggest that knowledge proceeds through a stratification of partial translations rather than through a progressive approach to an ultimate truth. And the diagram, as scheme that organizes information without pretending to exhaust its complexity, becomes her principal epistemological instrument. Grisi translates these theoretical instances into visual devices that make their functioning evident, exhibiting their artificiality as necessary condition of every attempt at representation.
Info:
Laura Grisi. The Endless Diagram
curated by Marco Scotini
29/112025 – 24/01/2026
P420 Via Azzo Gardino 9, Bologna
www.p420.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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