by the editorial staff
As the current year draws to a close, it’s fitting to remember an excellent artist who passed away last May 17 in Ponte San Pietro, near Bergamo; the Austrian, longtime resident in Italy, Jorrit Tornquist. Born in Graz in 1938 and arrived in Italy in the 1960s, he had developed an activity as a painter, teacher and designer focused on the study of color languages and their environmental uses. Starting with bauhausian, concretist and suprematist suggestions, and then dialoguing with the experiences of optical, kinetic and programmed art, Tornquist’s activity was characterized, both practically and theoretically, by his ability to process light and color in a rich range of compositional variations. In addition to the pictorial and sculptural production, that with an urban dimension stands out. Numerous, both in Austria and in the area of Piedmont and Lombardy where Tornquist was at home, were the companies and public and private buildings for which the artist designed pictorial interventions aimed at harmonizing architecture with landscape and atmosphere, in a dialogue made up of intangible vibrations. Among his most important decorative projects are those of 1980 for social housing in Grugliasco and Rivalta, 1996 for the waste-to-energy plant in Brescia, and 2002 for the power plant in Ponti sul Mincio. Almost unknown, but of great inventive quality, is Ti porta dentro e fuori, a small intervention made by Tornquist in 1997 in Dozza, near Bologna, during the “Biennale del Muro Dipinto” exhibition.
Homepage; Jorrit Tornquist, Ti porta dentro e fuori (detail), 1997, mural painting, Dozza (photo © Fondazione Dozza Città d'Arte).