Giuseppe Chiari

Giuseppe Chiari was born in Florence in 1926. He attended the Liceo Scientifico and enrolled in their engineering program. It was only after a few math exams that he became interested in the arts in their broadest sense: architecture, literature, show business, music, and fashion. He became increasingly involved in music, organizing conferences, conventions and concerts. He also founded a group called “Gruppo 70”.
With this group he has conducted research in Florence since 1963 on the visual value of texts. He considers a musical score not only as a basis for producing the sound of music, but as a painting to look at as well, in which the notes and the representation of gestures become visual elements. 1962 was the year of the musical exhibition-event "Musica e Segno", that he produced with Silvano Bussotti and presented in Rome at the “Galleria Numero”. Based on signs and the written word, this marked the beginning of Chiari's musical compositions. In the same year, again with Bussotti, he presented the exhibition “Gesto e Segno” at the Galleria Blu in Milan. During the late sixties the artist began a new phase of self-presentation in his artistic career. Abandoning his work as a composer, he strove to knock down the barriers between composer, player and listener by using his own physical presence to communicate with gestures and self-representation, becoming a constitutional part of this opus.
With his visual and musical activities, using gesture, sound, photocopies, sheets of paper, typographical print (easily-distributed materials, typical of Fluxus, for striking out at art, communication and institutional systems) and his 'visually innovative' instruments, he demolishes traditional painting, music and poetry techniques. From 1970 Chiari began to work with new methods of expression: collages on sheets of paper, musical scores, musical instruments, planks of wood – and later added bright splashes of colour. Despoiled of their primary sound function, the objects take on a visual role with their own new special musicality.