[1995#02] franco grignani
Selected Works By Franco Grignani
When we discuss about the graphic design matter, actually we always face artifacts, literally things made by an art: expression and goal of a craftmanship, oriented by a more or less specific goal (which distinguishes these artifacts from the “tools” of animals other than the man). The artifacts have a double, positively ambiguous nature, a kind of Janus face. As a matter of fact, artifacts are prosthetis, extensions and potentiation of our body; in this way may be conceived and understood the human tools, from the first stone modified in to a handy weapon for different purposes on, but the architecture too, as a structure/enclosure protecting the bodies and the social life, on a path that brings us to the cities and the civilization, as fruit of collective life under common rules, accepted imposed transmitted. At the same time, the artifacts are the express ion of human ideas, conceptions, wills, desires, needs for communication and memory, that gave birth to history, which in itself differs from memory being distance, separation rather than partecipation, inclusion, as memory is; in this way may be conceived and understood what we commonly call art, here in a wide meaning, ie including both the major arts (architecture, the highest one, the only being able to include in a superior unity all the others; sculpture; painting) as well the so called applied, decorative, minor or/and industrial arts, where taxonomically the graphic design is framed. So we may say, all together, that the tools have a communicative meaning in itself (they talk to us, we don’t merely or exclusively use them) and that the arts have a performance nature (we use them, and don’t merely or exlusively appreciate/enjoy them “esthetically”); or that the form is a tool and always has a meaning, a communication background/reason.
And it is not perhaps the form, at its origin, in itself ornament, ie an expressive/functional surplus applied to nature’s materials, something given by the man to the nature, a projection of his mind to reach and embody a meaning? Without the configuration of form, the artifacts do not simply exist; a handful of clay grabbed to the earth becomes a vase only when the man gives to the clay a form, when he trasform the absence of form/meaning in to an artifact, through the act of moulding a shape, ie ornamenting, decorating the matter, so freed from the natural status. The brute matter needs to be ornamented, to take a form (with a more or less complex shape/meaning, that’s not the point) to become artifact, to be part of the human inheritance of history and “built” environment: it needs a Gestaltung.
It has to be pointed now that the material, actual history of our artifacts is mostly the history of changing relationships, mutual exchanges, happy anachronisms and strong anticipations, between “carving”, “tracking”, “signing” tools (which imply different attitudes/gestures) and the “media”, the “carriers”: the stone and the chisel, the clay and the stick, the wax and the stylus, the wall/wood/canvas and the dipped brush, the paper and the pencil/chalk/watercolor/charcoal, the (ancient, artisanal, ie manufactured in limited quantity, so expensive) papyrus or parchment and the inked quill, the (modern, and more and more industrially manufactured, from the Renaissance times) paper and the inked plate, the paper and the toner charged by a laser beam, the film silver emulsion beamed by the light, and now the monitor (an emitting light glass screen coated with phosphoric pixels) and the electronic beam. With this approach, we come to conclude that the “content” of art, his problematic intimate nature, has always been “how” the artifacts are dne, instead of “what” they represent. From a creative perspective, which has to be assumed in order to fully undertstand what pushes and urges man to create and express himself, is the Gestaltung process to objectivate in form/matter the contents of artistic memories, needs, desires, dreams and phantasies.
In our times, another (r)evolution in the relations of tools/media has occurred, the coming of digital era over or, better to say, after to the analogue, but our menthality and cultural habits seems to be too often like a border, a limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. It appears clear that the new medium is the screen (whichever resolution it will have, and it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in a new medium what were the television, movie, radio, computer environments), the new tool is the light, the beams that excite the phosporic dots disseminated on a glass screen. So, the present challenge in the field of visual/graphic design, the border soon to be properly crossed (otherwise someone with no specific training/tradition but more bravery will occupy all this digital Far West) seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dynamic/acoustic dimension to the “bit” page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen?)”, giving to the designer a new unseen dimension, an additional depth, in comparison to the relation between type/text and images/pictures on “atomic” paper we all know, test and try, and a greater (even if dangerous) freedom on manipulating/trating the images/texts. History most probably never repeats itself, but it is an useful metaphor to say that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, which started (the old one) with the (r)evolution of printing, and now we’re crossing the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the transmission / communication / conservation of events and ideas; but we don’t know yet all about that, and perhaps aren’t fully aware yet of all the implications of that, anyway we’re going somewhere. Never as now the designers had such powerful tools on their own hands, provided they still use the tool number one, a grey jelly kept safe in a mervelously designed packaging, our brain, our mind. The designers should not miss this chance, and surrender in a competion that is a kind of selective evolution, as cruel and unsafe as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will disappear.
The selected works of Franco Grignani* to be seen in these pages prove once and for all the primacy of mind, of conception, of Gestaltung process for the visual design: a true artist is the one who is able to dream and build the tools of his work, indipendently of the actual media, standing on the past, looking for the future.
* Note
Alone master, the Italian visual designer, painter and photographer Franco Grignani, born in Pieve Porto Morone (Pavia) in 1908, trained as architect at the Polytechnic School of Turin (1929–33); after being part as painter of the late, second futurism, his artistic research came across the European abstract avantgarde movements, and developed a strong interested in the perception psichology of form, that results from the Fifties in his dinamic kind of OpArt, years before it: the mastering of perception rules is expressed by his visual experiments on virtual movement, optical illusion, subperceptions, distortions, moirés, dilatations, flous and so on, applied, with no breaks, from painting to graphic design, through pictures, images, patterns, signs and words. From the Thirties he works in the field of graphic design, collaborating ia with Borletti, Breda Nardi, Cremona Nuova, Dompé, Domus, Mondadori, Montecatini, Spi, Triennale; his artistic direction for Alfieri&Lacroix printing firm is particularly interesting, as it shows an exceptional integration of words (wrtitten by himself) and images. Very well known, his trademark for Lambswool is a paradigmatic example of his approach to sign design. For 26 years he has been art director of “Pubblicità in Italia”, a magazine devoted to Italian advertising and visual design. He wrote many essays on design and arts, and lectured in Europe and Usa.
[The Gestaltung Primacy (nella edizione tedesca della stessa rivista, Das Primat der Gestaltung), in “HQ High Quality” (Heidelberg), 3, 1995, pp. 34-39]
When we discuss about the graphic design matter, actually we always face artifacts, literally things made by an art: expression and goal of a craftmanship, oriented by a more or less specific goal (which distinguishes these artifacts from the “tools” of animals other than the man). The artifacts have a double, positively ambiguous nature, a kind of Janus face. As a matter of fact, artifacts are prosthetis, extensions and potentiation of our body; in this way may be conceived and understood the human tools, from the first stone modified in to a handy weapon for different purposes on, but the architecture too, as a structure/enclosure protecting the bodies and the social life, on a path that brings us to the cities and the civilization, as fruit of collective life under common rules, accepted imposed transmitted. At the same time, the artifacts are the express ion of human ideas, conceptions, wills, desires, needs for communication and memory, that gave birth to history, which in itself differs from memory being distance, separation rather than partecipation, inclusion, as memory is; in this way may be conceived and understood what we commonly call art, here in a wide meaning, ie including both the major arts (architecture, the highest one, the only being able to include in a superior unity all the others; sculpture; painting) as well the so called applied, decorative, minor or/and industrial arts, where taxonomically the graphic design is framed. So we may say, all together, that the tools have a communicative meaning in itself (they talk to us, we don’t merely or exclusively use them) and that the arts have a performance nature (we use them, and don’t merely or exlusively appreciate/enjoy them “esthetically”); or that the form is a tool and always has a meaning, a communication background/reason.
And it is not perhaps the form, at its origin, in itself ornament, ie an expressive/functional surplus applied to nature’s materials, something given by the man to the nature, a projection of his mind to reach and embody a meaning? Without the configuration of form, the artifacts do not simply exist; a handful of clay grabbed to the earth becomes a vase only when the man gives to the clay a form, when he trasform the absence of form/meaning in to an artifact, through the act of moulding a shape, ie ornamenting, decorating the matter, so freed from the natural status. The brute matter needs to be ornamented, to take a form (with a more or less complex shape/meaning, that’s not the point) to become artifact, to be part of the human inheritance of history and “built” environment: it needs a Gestaltung.
It has to be pointed now that the material, actual history of our artifacts is mostly the history of changing relationships, mutual exchanges, happy anachronisms and strong anticipations, between “carving”, “tracking”, “signing” tools (which imply different attitudes/gestures) and the “media”, the “carriers”: the stone and the chisel, the clay and the stick, the wax and the stylus, the wall/wood/canvas and the dipped brush, the paper and the pencil/chalk/watercolor/charcoal, the (ancient, artisanal, ie manufactured in limited quantity, so expensive) papyrus or parchment and the inked quill, the (modern, and more and more industrially manufactured, from the Renaissance times) paper and the inked plate, the paper and the toner charged by a laser beam, the film silver emulsion beamed by the light, and now the monitor (an emitting light glass screen coated with phosphoric pixels) and the electronic beam. With this approach, we come to conclude that the “content” of art, his problematic intimate nature, has always been “how” the artifacts are dne, instead of “what” they represent. From a creative perspective, which has to be assumed in order to fully undertstand what pushes and urges man to create and express himself, is the Gestaltung process to objectivate in form/matter the contents of artistic memories, needs, desires, dreams and phantasies.
In our times, another (r)evolution in the relations of tools/media has occurred, the coming of digital era over or, better to say, after to the analogue, but our menthality and cultural habits seems to be too often like a border, a limit, a powerful but static defensive protective device which evolves slower than the technology itself. It appears clear that the new medium is the screen (whichever resolution it will have, and it is easy to predict that both it will increase in higher definitions and it will mix in a new medium what were the television, movie, radio, computer environments), the new tool is the light, the beams that excite the phosporic dots disseminated on a glass screen. So, the present challenge in the field of visual/graphic design, the border soon to be properly crossed (otherwise someone with no specific training/tradition but more bravery will occupy all this digital Far West) seems to be the integration/coordination of sound and movement, that gives a new dynamic/acoustic dimension to the “bit” page (may will call so, for the moment, the screen?)”, giving to the designer a new unseen dimension, an additional depth, in comparison to the relation between type/text and images/pictures on “atomic” paper we all know, test and try, and a greater (even if dangerous) freedom on manipulating/trating the images/texts. History most probably never repeats itself, but it is an useful metaphor to say that we’re in a kind of new Renaissance, which started (the old one) with the (r)evolution of printing, and now we’re crossing the digital (r)evolution, already and again connected with the transmission / communication / conservation of events and ideas; but we don’t know yet all about that, and perhaps aren’t fully aware yet of all the implications of that, anyway we’re going somewhere. Never as now the designers had such powerful tools on their own hands, provided they still use the tool number one, a grey jelly kept safe in a mervelously designed packaging, our brain, our mind. The designers should not miss this chance, and surrender in a competion that is a kind of selective evolution, as cruel and unsafe as every evolutive process; otherwise, they will disappear.
The selected works of Franco Grignani* to be seen in these pages prove once and for all the primacy of mind, of conception, of Gestaltung process for the visual design: a true artist is the one who is able to dream and build the tools of his work, indipendently of the actual media, standing on the past, looking for the future.
* Note
Alone master, the Italian visual designer, painter and photographer Franco Grignani, born in Pieve Porto Morone (Pavia) in 1908, trained as architect at the Polytechnic School of Turin (1929–33); after being part as painter of the late, second futurism, his artistic research came across the European abstract avantgarde movements, and developed a strong interested in the perception psichology of form, that results from the Fifties in his dinamic kind of OpArt, years before it: the mastering of perception rules is expressed by his visual experiments on virtual movement, optical illusion, subperceptions, distortions, moirés, dilatations, flous and so on, applied, with no breaks, from painting to graphic design, through pictures, images, patterns, signs and words. From the Thirties he works in the field of graphic design, collaborating ia with Borletti, Breda Nardi, Cremona Nuova, Dompé, Domus, Mondadori, Montecatini, Spi, Triennale; his artistic direction for Alfieri&Lacroix printing firm is particularly interesting, as it shows an exceptional integration of words (wrtitten by himself) and images. Very well known, his trademark for Lambswool is a paradigmatic example of his approach to sign design. For 26 years he has been art director of “Pubblicità in Italia”, a magazine devoted to Italian advertising and visual design. He wrote many essays on design and arts, and lectured in Europe and Usa.
[The Gestaltung Primacy (nella edizione tedesca della stessa rivista, Das Primat der Gestaltung), in “HQ High Quality” (Heidelberg), 3, 1995, pp. 34-39]
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