Cardi Gallery London - EMILIO ISGRÒ and BEN VAUTIER | February 1 – March 19, 2022

22 Grafton Street, London W1S 4EX (Open Monday - Friday 10am - 6pm & Saturday by appointment only)

Cardi Gallery is proud to present its first solo #show dedicated to Italian artist #emilioisgro, in an intimate display occupying the first floor of its Mayfair townhouse. Born in 1937 in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Isgrò lives and works in Milan, where he moved in 1956 after a stint as an actor in Sicily. With a background in classical studies and no formal artistic training, the Sicilian artist approached the visual arts after years spent writing poetry and news reports. Through a practice focused on the encounter between word and image, this pioneering artist shook and profoundly reshaped visual language in post-war Italy. 
February 1 - March 19, 2022

Emilio Isgrò, Quattro libri rossi per la Colonna Infame, 2018In the early 1960s, his experience as a journalist at Il Gazzettino spilt  over into his first artworks, “Titoli di Giornale” (Newspaper Headlines), 1962–64, visual commentaries on the media treatment of information that  highlighted the deceptive relationship between truth and falsehood. He incorporated advertising in 1964 and began intervening through a radical gesture, that of erasure or deletion (‘cancellatura’ in Italian). Born out of observing a heavily corrected draft a colleague was editing for publication, this simple action soon became his signature. By 1966, Isgrò had theorised a personal form of visual poetry where word and image coexist to generate an organic aesthetic manifestation. Erasing printed notation with thick marks, leaving only one word or fragments legible, Isgrò intervenes on language, be it words on books, newspapers or historical documents, musical scores, or maps. In doing so, he dramatically alters the horizon of the visible, highlighting and bringing to the fore what is not erased. What may be deemed destructive is instead revelatory, offering new readings through a gesture capable of reframing and affirming reality. It is a gesture that in subverting codes of communication challenges the very structures of power that have infiltrated and shaped them. The artist’s quest for the essential exposes how the overabundance of words - as much as of images - makes #people blind, desensitised to meaning. To Isgrò, this is a philosophical and anthropological issue affecting us all: his act of destruction of the word sets the stage for the reconstruction of being human. While the results of these erasures are pictorial, these works are not paintings. Instead, they are constructions of metaphors, jousting historical and contemporary icons, solidifying them into a decontextualised mythology that speaks of cultural universalism.
The works included in this exhibition, produced between 2010 and 2018, present erasures on either physical books or pages in different languages and cultural  ages. Italian classics such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, with a cantica from Heaven focussing on light, truth, and the pursuit of knowledge, and Manzoni’s historical essay Storia della Colonna Infame, are displayed alongside pages from legal codexes in Latin and Turkish. #emilioisgro Artist, poet, dramaturge and director, #emilioisgro is one of the pioneers of the post-war artistic language.
Born in 1937 in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, he lives and works in Milan, where he moved in 1956 after a stint as an actor in Sicily. With a background in classical studies and no formal artistic training, Isgrò approached the
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EMILIO ISGRÒ
1 FEBRUARY-19 MARCH, 2022 
Monday to Friday 10am-6pm
Saturday by appointment only
C A R D I G A L L E R Y | L O N D O N 
22 Grafton Street
London W1S 4EX 
#EMILIOISGRO @CARDIGALLERY #cardigallery.COM
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visual arts after years of practice as a writer working with poetry and news reporting.
Famous for his radical gesture of erasure – cancellatura in Italian – he recalls how this signature of his was born out of observing a heavily corrected draft by Il Gazzettino’s colleague Giovanni Comisso that he was editing for publication.
“I am #emilioisgro, and I can do only one thing: erase what is superfluous.” His gestures are not destructive; instead, they are revelatory as they open up a text to new readings. His quest for the essential alongside removing the superfluous exposes how the overabundance of words – as much as images – makes #people blind, desensitised to the meaning of words. Another crucial motif in Isgrò’s practice is the duality between humanity and nature, investigated incorporating in many of his works delicate insects: swarms of bees to symbolise culture, ants reminding us of our fragility. Furthermore, the artist works extensively with maps; toponomastics – the names #people assign to places – is erased to balance nature’s anthropisation and allow the land to exist beyond the confines of geography. His artworks were featured in some of the most important exhibition worldwide, such as “The Artist and the Book in Twentieth-Century Italy” presented in 1992-1993 at the MoMA, New York and in 1994 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In June 2013 he held a solo #show at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome and from June to September 2016 a major retrospective was held in multiple locations in Milan as a tribute to him.

CARDI GALLERY
22 Grafton Street, 
W1S 4EX London
Tel +44 (0)203 409 9633
LINKS:
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instagram.com/cardigallery/
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#EmilioIsgro

22 Grafton Street, London W1S 4EX (Open Monday - Friday 10am - 6pm & Saturday by appointment only)

Cardi Gallery is proud to present, Sehnsucht, the first ever solo #show in Britain dedicated to French artist #benvautier (b. Naples, 1935; lives and works in Nice). Displayed on the ground floor of the Grafton Street townhouse is a selection of paintings he created between 1975 and 2016. The #show marks Ben’s return to Mayfair after sixty years of absence. In October 1962, invited by Daniel Spoerri to partake in the Festival of Misfits, for two weeks Ben took residence in a cage behind Gallery One’s shop window in North Audley Street, a living sculpture on display around the clock, surrounded by a maze of boldly painted texts on panels. London proved pivotal for the development of his practice: it was here that he first met George Maciunas, the father of newly formed Fluxus, and he soon became the “100% Fluxus man”, 
completely blurring the boundaries between art and life through irreverent 
February 1 - March 19, 2022
Ben Vautier, PENSER, 2014 performances, gigs, and bringing theatre into the streets. Ben has been conceptually distilling his total art, total theatre and the performing of mundane actions into an art form that brings together art, life, and philosophy, through his tableaux-écriture. The thickly poured paint forming the letters in the artist’s distinctive cursive handwriting, is set on often glossy, colourful monochrome backgrounds. These handwritten word slogans on a variety of supports which he still produces to this day are iconic bearers of often controversial messages laden with wit and irony. They are linguistic images dealing with a broad spectrum of issues that Ben centers back to the world's motor, ego: from selfreflection as an artist, through postmodernism, to ethnology and religion. Reminiscent of the Japanese haiku,for their startling brevity and the deep feeling of wonder about the word they convey, Ben’s words are at once pungent and playful moments of enlightenment that set the viewer on a humorous journey of introspection. 
Ben Vautier
Ben, pseudonym of Benjamin Vautier, is one of the principal founders of the Fluxus group. Born in 1935 in Naples, Italy, Vautier moved to Nice in 1949, where he lives and works to this day. After many years working at a bookshop, he decided to open a small record store, which soon became an exhibition and hangout place popular amongst the School of Nice artists: César, Arman, Martial Raysse, etc. 
Convinced that “art must be new and bring a shock”, he produced his first drawings based on simplified banana motif variations. This series marked the beginning of his graphic research. 
In 1962, Ben became involved with the nascent Fluxus movement. His Fluxus works aimed at defining art as a practice that unifies life, objects and philosophy, developing alongside the notion of appropriation based on the idea that, in art, everything is possible. He, therefore, started to sign everything that had no artistic paternity: #people, paintings, photographs, etc. Working on the notions of self, ego, and artist identity, he developed the concept that if art is only a matter of signature, the more visible it is, the more the public will desire it. 
His work gained popularity in the 1960s thanks to his writings in various media and forms, notorious for combining impertinence and accuracy of purpose. Relating his everyday joys and misfortunes with an innate sense of humour, 
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BEN VAUTIER
SEHNSUCHT
1 FEBRUARY-19 MARCH, 2022 
Monday to Friday 10am-6pm
Saturday by appointment only 
CARDI GALLERY | LONDON 
22 Grafton Street
London W1S 4EX 
#BENVAUTIER @CARDIGALLERY #cardigallery.COM
PRESS RELEASE
he articulated many themes, expressing his feelings, passions and obsessions through his concise catchphrases. Initially, Ben traced his words with a brush, generally in oil on wood, and then resorted to a technique consisting of “writing” on canvas with acrylic paint poured straight out of the tube. Due to their format, the significantly reduced colours and the signalling effect of writing, his early works sit closer to message signboards than conventional painting. The exhibition “About Nice” inaugurated in 1977 at the Centre Georges Pompidou 
was the Parisian recognition of the research carried out by Vautier and the School of Nice. 
Ben’s works are included in the world’s largest private and public collections, including MoMA in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, the MUHKA in Antwerp, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Solothurn Museum in Switzerland, Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, M. A.C. Marseille, M.A.C. Lyon. 

CARDI GALLERY
22 Grafton Street, 
W1S 4EX London
Tel +44 (0)203 409 9633
LINKS:
cardigallery.com
instagram.com/cardigallery/
facebook.com/cardigallery
twitter.com/cardigallery?lang=en
@cardigallery
#BenVautier

Cardi Gallery
The #cardigallery was founded in Milan, Italy in April 1972 by Renato Cardi with a focus on fostering the work of contemporary Italian artists. In the late 1960’s Renato Cardi started to collect works by artists like Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Michelangelo Pistoletto, who were all relatively unknown at the time. Over the subsequent years Renato built a distinguished collection that spanned from #arte Povera to Spatialism. Through both his inextinguishable passion for art and the subsequent success of theof the Galleria Cardi, Renato earned the reputation as a critically engaged champion of developing artists, one who made major contributions to launching many of their careers. Now led by Renato’s son Nicolo, the #cardigallery continues to shape the cultural landscape in Milan and abroad. In 2015, the #cardigallery opened its first overseas venue, expanding its presence to London’s Mayfair district where it is housed in a magnificent 17th century Georgian townhouse on Grafton Street boasting six storeys and over 10,000 sq feet of exhibition space. Both Cardi London and Cardi Milan host regular museum-quality exhibitions that are accompanied by a scholarly catalogue or an artist monograph often featuring texts by eminent critics such as Germano Celant, Francesco Bonami and Achille Bonito Oliva.
The Cardi Gallery’s unique specialist expertise in Italian Modern, PostWar and Contemporary art – specifically in #arte Povera, Minimalism and Zero Group – has contributed to building some of the finest and most historically important private collections across Europe, the Americas and the Far East. The Gallery also regularly lends works for museum exhibitions internationally.
“The first exhibition season of our 2022 programme at #cardigallerylondon is curated by Davide di Maggio. I am especially proud to introduce the works of #emilioisgro and #benvautier, two key artists whose sharp irony helps us look at the world through different lenses”. Nicolo Cardi