Informal Art in Italy

The history of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna is filled with exhibitions related to the events of informal Italian art. The title of the section owes its name to the homonymous exhibition held in Bologna in 1983 curated by Renato Barilli and Franco Solmi, which consisted of a broad review of the main exponents of the trend. In this room, as in the historical exhibition, works by artists connected to the local area (Andrea Raccagni, Nino Migliori) are juxtaposed to those of the main representatives at a national level (Toti Scialoja, Gastone Novelli). In Italy, the period of informal art was made up of many spirits that defy a single definition: groups that were bound by geographical location and teams that came together around a manifesto, formed the whole vast heterogeneous conglomerate.
The Galleria di Cronache was founded in Bologna in 1945, by a large group of artists which included Aldo Borgonzoni, Carlo Corsi and Ilario Rossi. The city, from that moment, experienced a rebirth of a growing cultural movement that resulted in greater attention to the arts, especially painting. In 1954, two key events attested to the importance of Bologna in the informal Italian art scene: the magazine "Paragone" published the essay Gli ultimi naturalisti by Francesco Arcangeli, future director of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, and the gallery La Loggia was opened in Via Castiglione. The “last naturalism” apparently singled out, according to the Emilian critic, the last gasp of nature painting found in the work of Pompilio Mandelli, Mattia Moreni and Ennio Morlotti.

Sign, Gesture, Matter

The most widely accepted theories of Informal Art divide the results of such a vast movement in three categories: sign, gesture and matter. The postwar artistic climate is the prolific background for these new investigations of signs, gestures and materials. Painting and sculpture, with their canonical means, are set apart in favor of an expressive freedom which itself is tightly linked to the experimentation of new materials and the hybridization of languages. In the United States, the informal paradigm was represented by the Action Painting of Jackson Pollock, a style of painting based on the artist’s gesture and on the chance in the application of colour. On the European front, the exploded figuration of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier in France, the different materiality of Antoni Tàpies in Spain, were reference points for the entire trend.
In Italy, the uneven and jagged landscape had a common denominator in the material element. Pinot Gallizio’s pittura industriale (industrial painting) liberates the work from the confines of the picture and turn it into a continuous stream. The chemical alteration of the elements in the works of Leoncillo, the use of reinforced concrete by Giuseppe Uncini and the combustions of Alberto Burri are just some of the innovative practices that opened up important avenues for Italian art in the late Sixties.

Forma 1

If Tancredi’s painting offers an opportunity to include one of the most interesting research avenues in Italian abstract art in the sphere of Spatialism, it is impossible not to note that the collections of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna are proof of a great consonance with the objectives explicitly expressed by the manifesto of Forma 1, signed in 1947 by Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo, and Giulio Turcato: «We declare ourselves FORMALISTS and MARXISTS, convinced that the terms Marxism and Formalism are not irreconcilable, especially now that the progressive elements of our society must maintain a REVOLUTIONARY and AVANT-GARDE position and not relax into the ambiguity of an exhausted and conformist realism».
The anchoring of the European research on abstract art offered artists of the post-WWII era the opportunity for an autonomous painting and sculptural idiom. The scheme of a modernity that made it possible to escape decadent or psychological influences that, with a certain ideological bias, would still be a hallmark of the art from the fascist period. The controversy was also directed at those authors of the Fronte nuovo delle Arti and those painters (especially Guttuso) who used figurative painting as a "battle cry" to remain faithful to the commitment to expose the conditions of the poor and the needs of the masses involved in historical processes, and in which art could be an auxiliary tool.

The Space of Painting

Lucio Fontana was crucial to the development of post-war Italian art. His cutting into the monochrome surface marks the transition from painting to space. The gesture of breaking through the canvas to the space beyond it is one of the cornerstones of a new way of making art, which later research into the abstract, conceptual and environmental forms would have to deal with. Two-dimensions and representation, the painting as a "window" and the "completed form" were to become anachronistic categories. Giulio Carlo Argan writes: «As a sculptor, Fontana destroys sculpture: he models huge spheres and splits them. As a painter, he destroys painting: he spreads colour on canvas and then slashes it, with one or more quick cuts, sharp as a razor. It's a gesture: but the gesture that splits the sphere connects the internal space with the external space, the gesture that cuts the canvas restores the continuity between the space behind and the space in front of the flat surface». Fontana destroyed the art of the past, but opened up scenarios that would be investigated by other leading figures of the century. Among these were the founders of the magazine "Azimuth" and in particular Enrico Castellani, who recombined the movement of the gesture on the canvas and the choice of monochromes in a compositional criterion that allowed him to return to work on the surface of the painting with light and rhythmic reliefs, to paint with lights and shadows, according to an arithmetic of space that could relate to potentially repeatable processes and therefore allude to the infinite.