Betty Danon at Galleria Tiziana Di Caro

Tra segno e sogno (Between Sign and Dream) is Betty Danon’s fourth solo exhibition in the spaces of Galleria Tiziana Di Caro in Naples. The exhibition is part of a research project aimed at presenting the artist’s body of work, which the gallery has been carrying out over a seven-year period, in collaboration with the Danon Archive. A selection of unpublished works on paper from 1980 to 1990 is now on show – ranging from drawing, collage, frottage and wet ink – following on from past exhibitions, in chronological order, on collage and pictorial works from 1969 to ‘73, abstract and asemantic scores from the 1970s and Danon’s artistic production from the early 1980s.

Betty Danon’s artistic career was marked by a watershed year, 1979, when she made her last ‘public’ appearance in the art world, which took place during the exhibition of her work Io&gli altri (Me&The Others) at Guido Le Noci’s Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. After this, Danon focused on experimentation of the the freest and purest kind, abandoning contemporary art’s conventional circuit and continuing to work for herself and her artist friends through mail art. The year 1979 also marked a transition from the point of view of her artistic production, moving from the use of black and white to the increasingly dense and consistent use of colour, together with a continuous tension involving the elements that characterise Danon’s art: experimentation, sound, the pentagram and writing.

The exhibition begins with a homage to Arthur Rimbaud and his poem Le bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat, 1871), for which the artist created six small works in postcard format, each with a verse in pencil written on the front accompanied by an abstract image obtained using the wet Indian ink technique. Images of the French poet’s drunken boat navigating without a crew – a metaphor for the human condition – are superimposed on Danon’s attempt to interpret an existential situation that she recognises and then makes her own. The second room presents three work cycles, also created during this experimentation phase, albeit with some echoes of the past. Ten Green Sounds in A4 format, obtained through asemantic writing and the dynamic use of the pentagram, whose continuous line is sometimes broken by the introduction of natural elements – seedlings, small leaves and pistils – replacing the notes, in constant tension with sound “as the original substance of all things”. These ten works are positioned along the entire wall, ideally recomposing a broken and fragmented sound track. This is followed by two works entitled As Prometheus Said. In the wake of the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to mankind, Danon identifies a point of contact between the divine and the terrestrial by choosing to place the pentagram on a background of burnt paper. Finally, there are three untitled works in small format representing a further phase of Danon’s experimentation where, using a typewriter and photocopier, she copies, recopies and assembles a text that is difficult to read.

The last room presents four works created after the mid-1980s: Suoni di Venezia (Sounds of Venice, 1986) in which, along the lines of the 39th Art Biennale of 1980 where the artist participated as part of the special project Il tempo del Museo Venezia, Danon produced two small paintings. In these, against the pentagram background of St. Mark’s portico, a dot expands along the line to create dynamic, undulating forms linked to the idea of water. On the opposite wall, four works from the collage series Donna Prima Vera (1983-87) are exhibited, which best represent the artist’s move towards experimentation.

For these works, the artist uses different techniques, such as pointillism, frottage and wet Indian ink, to depict Botticelli’s Primavera, in a blaze of colour, never excessive but always refined. Finally, there are four small collages from the Seul le Silence (Only the Silence) series, in which gold, silver and pastel-coloured paper provides a backdrop for different writings – photocopied or in Indian ink – that are piled up on the surface, so as to create almost illegible vertical or diagonal scores. Then there are three works from Paesaggio intransitivo (Intransitive Landscape, 1987), where increasingly different vibrations are created by a photocopied dot and line placed on sheets of pastel-coloured paper and then moved.

Leaving the contemporary art world allowed Betty Danon to free her creativity and experiment using heterogeneous modes of expression, held together by her poetic coherence based on “being and becoming, the happenings of the micro and macrocosm, the mystery of chance and the ambiguity of reality.”