While many exponents of the New York School, of which he was a founding member, along with Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Koonig, constantly inclined toward formal simplification, Richard Pousette-Dart continued to accentuate, in his works, the complexity of the visual discourse.
His passion for psychology,the creation of myths,anthropology, African and American tribal art, interests hardly shared by the other abstract Expressionists, allows us to understand how he considered art to be a process of growing elaboration and keenness, both of thought and of sentiments.
For Pousette- Dart, matter and abstract symbols can reveal the spiritual dimension of reality. Thus, his paintings become a slow process for revealing universal truths, atavistic symbols to be reproduced on canvas, metaphors of being and its complexity. Cockscomb Garden, Nocturnal Landscape, Golden Presence, Lost on the threshold: these titles evoke a magical, transcendental aspect. Matter seems to pulsate, to live inside the canvas.
The vast surfaces, completely pigmented by subtle layers of colour, spread, splashed and applied with strong vehemence, with extraordinary technical mastery, like stained glass windows in old cathedrals: they radiate light in a sublime metaphysical enchantment.
This is the first retrospective dedicated to the American artist in Europe. On display, there are 47 paintings, covering the entire artistic production of Pousette- Dart, placing in relief his stylistic and technical evolution.