‘Interrupted’ art

Acrylic on canvas painting by Giorgio Griffa in his show “Paths in the Forest,’’ June 13-Oct. 12 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.

The museum says:

“For almost sixty years, Giorgio Griffa has explored the potential of painting in a practice that is both rigorous and lyrical. Griffa (born in 1936 in Turin, Italy, where he lives and works) paints with diluted acrylics in pastel colors on unstretched, unprimed canvases. These are tacked to the wall for display and folded for storage, a memory of which persists in their creases. Griffa values ‘the intelligence of materials’ and views his paintings as neither representational nor abstract, but as real, material facts.

“‘Impersonal marks that belong to any hand, with thousands of years of memory’ are Griffa’s subject; he follows and blurs the lines of drawing, counting, and writing. Griffa ‘interrupts’ his paintings before they are finished because, ‘in the meantime, life has moved on,’ an idea he credits to Zen Buddhism. Like the artist himself, each work remains vital: ‘Leaving the work incomplete means symbolically omitting that final point, which, like the period at the end of this sentence, fixes it in the past.”’