Tra presente e passato: alcune considerazioni sui ‘quadri d’argento’ di Giosetta Fioroni

Between 1960 and the early 1970s Giosetta Fioroni, an artist linked to the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, experiments with silver industrial enamel. At first she paints monochrome works in which the existential values that the informel attributes to the brushwork are almost obliterated; then, from 1963 onwards, she paints works based on photographs pertaining to very different fields: advertising, art history, perso-nal and family experiences, magic tales, the history of fascism and, finally, the landscapes of the Veneto. These works have a complex temporality: thanks to the evocative and allusive character of silver, which recalls the glimmer of the mirror plates of daguerreotypes, contemporary images are transfigured and given another temporal dimension. This paper focuses on this important phase of the work of Fioroni: it analyzes the peculiar aspects and the most important episodes of the series of ‘silver paintings’, puts them into the context of the art of the Sixties in Rome and, especially, it compares the “silver paintings” with contemporary Pop Art and Scuola di Piazza del Popolo artworks. The paper analyzes also the coexistence of different sources in Fioroni’s works: photography, film, literature, history, anthropology and folklore