Mario Diacono. Iconography and Archetypes. The Form of Painting 1985-1994

This volume collects texts written over the years by Mario Diacono (Roma, 1930) to accompany exhibitions he held in his gallery, in Boston and in New York.
The dates 1985-1994 in the title do not entirely coincide with the years in which all the texts published here appeared, for they refer only to the decade in which he first exhibited the artists discussed.
The decision to focus on painting was partly due to the preeminence that this medium - deconstructed and reshaped - had taken after the Minimalist, Conceptualist, Poverist, Post-Minimalist, and Performance years at the time he opened a gallery in Italy.
Furthermore the evolution of art in the twentieth century, up to the mid-1960s, had been paced by painting, and painting was once more the form where the interrogation of art was taking place at the moment of its perceived historical completion. Mario Diacono's essays thus present a survey of twentieth century art, through the analysis of the work of some of its protagonists, among whom Alex Katz, Julian Schnabel, Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, Günter Förg, Peter Halley, Richmond Burton, Roni Horn, Annette Lamieux.
The volume also includes a chronology and an index.