I’ve always considered Carla Accardi’s sicofoil works among her most inspired creations. Painting with pure colour has been – from Manet onwards – one of the great artistic challenges. To bring out the best in colour, Accardi switched support. No more canvases or boards, materials which inevitably absorb pigment, but a transparent plastic sheet onto which colour is applied directly from the tube. By virtue of its translucent qualities, sicofoil exalts colours and strengthens their beauty and freshness. Accardi’s intuition in this respect was as simple as it was effective, comparable to Fontana’s holes and slashes. In the past, similar effects had been obtained by means of lacquer or stained glass: elaborate and complex techniques through which light was imprisoned and reflected. Carla Accardi achieves similar these results through an entirely innovative support: a product of the scientific research undertaken in Italy at the time, which, as Laura Cherubini and Flavia Frigeri note in the pages of this catalogue, offered new possibilities in those same years to artists, architects and designers alike. However, a certain openness and receptiveness were required in order to appreciate these novelties. Accardi possessed both, and focused her entire career in this direction, with a steadfast readiness to put her accomplishments behind her and seek out new, uncharted territories. For this reason, her artistic research, while rooted in the 1950s, continues to shine forth so alive and present.
Matteo Lampertico
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