La "rarefazione dell'immagine-materia". Il processo di astrazione nell'opera di Betty Danon

The work of the Italian-turkish artist betty Danon (Istanbul, 1927 - Milan 2002) is characterized by a common denominator in the different stages of her production: in fact, Danon started from an abstract lexicon in her acrylics and collages and then continued in this direction, taking the detachment from the referential datum to an extreme even in her laterverbovisual production. Abstraction is a constant: if her musical scores are abstract, for her the act of writing is an overcoming of the visible and thus of figuration. A gradual detachment, starting from personal inwardness to arrive at a spiritual elevation, sought and proclaimed since her Dichiarazione di poetica (1972), where the ultimate goal is the “rarefaction of image-matter”, towards a “spiritual-cosmiccommunication”, in her own words. It was possible to deepen the Danon’s research in the field of abstraction, in the light of the new materials that have emerged thanks to the artist’s archives made available by her heirs, the Archivio del ’900 of the Mart Museum in rovereto, and the archives of the Galleria Milano, where the artist had a solo exhibition in 1977 and a retrospective in 2021.