Ochre, 1962, tempera on canvas, 28 47/64 × 36 7/32 in.
©Foto Massimo Listri
Antonio Sanfilippo (Partanna 1923 – Rome 1980)
In 1938, he specialized in art as a high school student in Palermo. In 1942 he enrolled in the painting course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he studied under Felice Carena. In 1944, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, he met Carla Accardi, with whom he visited Paris. In 1947 he joined the Forma group. The following year he exhibited at the Rome Quadriennale and the Venice Biennale. In the 1950s he held personal exhibitions at the Cavallino in Venice, at the Schneider in Rome and at the Naviglio in Milan; he also exhibited in Tokyo, New York, Osaka and Pittsburgh. He returned to the Biennale in 1954, 1964 and 1966 with a large personal room, which marked him out as one of the leading figures in Italian abstractionism. In the 1960s he held solo shows at the New Vision Centre Gallery in London, the Arco d’Alibert in Rome and the Naviglio in Milan. He also exhibited in Chicago, Boston, Paris and Bern. In 1971 he held a solo show at the Editalia Gallery in Rome. In 1980 Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea dedicated a large anthological exhibition to him.
Exhibited by the artist in 1962 at the 16th edition of the F.P. Michetti national painting prize in Francavilla a Mare, the work Ochre is part of a group of works made by Sanfilippo mainly in 1962 and 1963, in which the artist plays on the crowding of signs within clearly defined chromatic areas, very often of a uniform black color, as is the case here. The emergence of these closed figures, which sometimes explicitly recall the shape of speech balloons and the narrative structure of comic books, shows that Sanfilippo was close to the research that Cesare Vivaldi at the time called “new figuration,” which involved many of his peers and companions in those years in Rome: Carla Accardi, of course, but also Achille Perilli, Gastone Novelli, Toti Scialoja and Giulio Turcato. In the paintings of previous years, the dense web of signs was evenly spread on the canvas, entirely covering its surface, recalling the “all-over painting” characteristic of many informal artists. Here, on the other hand, the signs are enclosed by the artist within a delimited structure. “Finding a way to make simple colored areas… without hindering the development of the small sign,” Sanfilippo wrote in a brief note from that period, summarizing in a few words his intention to merge the energy, variety and vitality of his typical “small sign” with a clearer, more linear spatial construction. (Paola Bonani)