Among all the approaches that emerged from Programmed Art, Lucia Di Luciano’s stands out for its consistency and discipline. In the early 1960s, along with her husband Giovanni Pizzo, Di Luciano helped found two separate artistic initiatives in Rome: Gruppo 63, which lasted only one year but yielded a significant literary movement, and Operativo R, born from its ashes and just slightly longer-lived. Both championed an aesthetic investigation based on complex mathematical rules, emulating the strategies of technology without employing it directly. In an attempt, following the logic of the computers that were just then coming into use, to eliminate every trace of emotion from her compositions, the artist first gave up colour and, as we can see from her series Irradiazioni (1965), created psychedelic, black-and-white compositions on masonite of squares and rectangles that have been mathematically sequenced to give the appearance of movement through tensions, impulses, and vibrations. Their titles – Rapporto alternativo, Divergenze, Ritmi – bring to mind the structural experiments of Constructivism and the Bauhaus. These works, despite their intentionally anti-emotional, geometric austerity, become a sort of score over which the gaze can range at will, with as many different visual approaches as there are viewers.
Stefano Mudu
