The Marconi Foundation and Studio Marconi ’65, together with the Cortesi Gallery in Milan, are pleased to dedicate a large retrospective exhibition to Gianfranco Pardi, 85 years after the artist’s birth.
Promoted by the Gianfranco Pardi Archive and curated by Bruno Corà, the project will fully represent the artistic career of the Milanese artist, which centred on the study of space and the relationship between abstraction and construction. Pardi began to reflect on architecture as early as the late Sixties.  
What the artist meant by “architecture” was a procedure, a creative process, a means by which he was able to concentrate on the constructive possibilities of form, of investigations into three-dimensionality, which clearly refer to avant-garde utopias, Russian suprematism, constructivism and Dutch neoplasticism.
Reinterpreting Malevič, Tatlin, El Lisitzky and other key exponents of these movements allowed Pardi to take the still vital elements of these artistic directions and become one of the
most active and qualified representatives of the history of contemporary painting and sculpture. This extensive retrospective  illustrates the development of Pardi’s explorations at every phase,  from the first depictions of architectural interiors and exteriors of the Sixties, such as the Environments and Hanging Gardens, to subsequent works from the Seventies, which he named Architectures.
The  series Diagonals are from the early Eighties and consist of straight lines whose tight rhythm oscillates between black and white to a search for new montages and movements.  
These are followed by the works Plants and Apses, and the cycles Cinema and Body Building.
The Nineties saw the series Masks and Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the latter a clear reference to Cézanne and a total reflection on painting.
The following Nagjma series, meaning "star" in Arabic, are the fruit of the artist's long periods in Tangier, a sort of re-enactment of Paul Klee’s or Henri Matisse’s journey to the south, and the series entitled Box, made from cardboard boxes, which show Pardi's increasing interest in painting, although still combined with geometric elements and architectural references.
The exhibition concludes with the Untitled works from 2011: a series of acrylics on canvas in which the colour range restricted to tones of white, black and grey seems redolent of fresco painting.