Piero Golia: Kanazawa (5 red blocks)

This woodcut by Piero Golia belongs to a 2018 series of traditional Japanese woodblock prints made in collaboration with artisans from Japan’s Mie prefecture overseen by Kyoto-based studio Kamisoe. Printed on washi paper produced by Yoshiki Yamaguchi, the series bridges abstraction and figuration, formally and conceptually reimagining established aesthetics and techniques by repurposing multiple woodblocks already carved for earlier ukiyo-e prints. Designing his own compositions and printing in single colors—here rendering a delicate arrangement of irregular lines and ambiguous shapes in a rich primary red—before adding his personal seal, Golia integrates traditional and contemporary approaches.

Known as a “sculptor of situations,” Golia aims to expand the possibilities of art via heterogeneous strategies and processes that share the capacity to alter viewers’ perception, even when they leave no objects or images behind. For an exhibition at Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland, in 2017, he realized the kinetic sculpture The Painter, which featured a robot programmed to paint geometric shapes whenever it detected movement within the exhibition space; Kanazawa (5 red blocks), too, subverts expectations of abstraction’s origins and aims.