From 5 December 2019 to 30 January 2020, 10 A.M. ART in Milan will be presenting, in collaboration with and curated by the Archivio Ennio Ludovico Chiggio, an anthological show that will be complementary to the first exhibition devoted by the gallery to the work of Chiggio in 2014, and that testifies to the continuous research that has always characterised this complex and heterogeneous artist. The great theoretical involvement that has always been a characteristic his actions, has led him to a strong criticism of artistic behaviour which he has always refused in preference for all the aspects of an experimental “shaping”, a choice that in the 1960s led him to be one of the founders of the Gruppo Enne, an avant-garde movement of Kinetic and Programmed art that aimed at overcoming art for art’s sake and indeterminate, casual painting, and at searching for truth and collective ethics.

The Modalità provvisoria, the Provisional Manner, of the show’s title, refers back to the constantly evolving action typical of an artistic research undertaken through a “synthesis” of various branches of knowledge, continuously reconnected and organised.

The Modalità provvisoria is a studio and workshop activity characterised by the philosophical complexity of the hypotheses to be inquired into and of the perfection of visual demonstrations, which is all then translated into works.

“Precipitated” into these Sintesi percettive, perceptive syntheses, are the Pratiche discorsive, the conversational or textual undertakings that accompany the works in order to reveal the mental method of a thought that becomes visual.

Also reconnected to the Modalità provvisoria is the diagnostic technique necessary for investigating the good functioning of an “operative system” and Chiggio, with mechanical devices, has always worked in a revolutionary manner, placing himself both at the heart and at the edges of experimental logical procedures and oscillating between insights and a logical demonstration of the underlying mental constructive process.

The artist’s formal researches, far distant from ephemeral conditionings, are in fact the outcome, the aesthetic crystallisation of an extreme mathematical, scientific, and philosophical rigour that, by advancing by continuous verifications, finds its “provisional shaping” in the most diverse areas of knowledge.

On show will be various works from the first period: from the perceptive instability of the Diffrazioni, Riflessioni, and Interferenze lineari to the dynamic Luci struttura , the stochastic movement of the Mobile and the Dinamiche Optical works; there will also be exhibited such more recent pieces as the Ronda Sonora, open to interventions by the public, the cognitive researches of the Margini, the alternating patterns of Bianco Rosso, and the unpredictable forms of the Dissezioni matematiche in which two polygons of an equal area are transformed into each other.

In 1964, together with Teresa Rampazzi, he created sound for the Gruppo Enne’s exhibition room at the Venice Biennale and, due to the need for a formalisation of group involvement, in 1965 he founded in Padua, again with Teresa Rampazzi, the “Gruppo di fonologia musicale NPS” for the production of electronic sound objects.

As part of the NPS, Chiggio, besides operatively undertaking musical composition, was to carve out a basic theoretical function by occupying himself with the phenomenology of compositional procedures, and creating Audiogramma, an innovative tool for the graphic notation of the new experimental music.

And in fact it is some Frammenti di Oggetti sonori that will follow the viewers on their visit to the show by playing in the background.

In 1964 Chiggio also began his activity as a designer where he was soon to become known for his professional and planning capacity: in 1970 he was awarded the SMAU prize for a control watch designed for Solari, and in 1973 he became part of the managing board of ADI (the association of industrial design) in Milan; of particular interest is his collaboration with Dino Gavina for whom he curated the image of Simon and the cultural meetings of the Centro Duchamp; his consultancies extended to important Italian and foreign businesses in the sector of glasses and light prefabrication in the USA. Among his other unexpected deployments was an incursion into fashion, and in 1991 for Schiapparelli Mode in Paris, Chiggio planned the relaunch of the brand and a new edition of the artists’ clothes once designed by Cocteau, Man Ray, Dalì, Vertès, Bérard, Van Dongen, Giacometti, and Fini.

Having closed his period with the Gruppo Enne, and with it the long period of neo-gestalt, towards 1970 he began to question himself about new hypotheses of Alternanze; in these years he was to come across Cantor’s theory with its subsets and which was to lead him to work on his Alternanze Bianco Rosso: a fragmentation into subsets which was able to generate new actualising series.

These marks of attention that are able to catalyse the subject by blocking the surrounding environment, continued to be at the bottom of all his art until today, because he is able to focus his eyes on “that segment”, as though waiting for another reparatory or corrective sign.

In answer to the need for continuous research, in 1980 Chiggio, together with other young artists from Padua, founded the “Movimento Ludico” and, together with Giulia Laverda, he opened the Galleria TOT, a place for group and workshop exhibitions, and where there were to converge the latest trends in contemporary design, installations, happenings, and conceptual researches into the performability of recreational language.

Besides some of the “recreational” objects made by Chiggio, in the show it will be possible to consult the splendid editorial “Nomenklatura”, as he calls it, in other words the eclectic catalogues/works of art realised and edited by the artist and that collect together the heterogeneous materials developed in the almost ten years of action by the TATA group.