ANTONIO CALDERARA

Provenance:
- Artist's studio.
- Formerly Fondazione Antonio e Carmela Calderara, Vacciago.

Exhibition: St. Moritz 2015/16, Horzions, Abstracts and Epigrams. Galerie Stefan Hildebrandt, 19 December 2015 - 19 March 2016.

Antonio Calderara gained his ever-increasing recognition as draughtsman, painter and graphic artist for his late abstract work.
The decisive turn he took towards abstraction in the late 1950s was however not an abrupt turn. Stimulated by his encounter with Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, this proved to be the natural development of a path he had already embarked upon. In the reduction to horizontal and vertical lines before an almost empty pictorial space, Calderara’s first career choice as an engineer, although a career which he quickly abandoned in favour of painting, shines through in his works.

As an autodidact, he initially produced figurative art with classical pictorial themes, such as splendid landscapes and atmospheric everyday scenes. The formal vocabulary which he used in his non-representational works, was already present in his representational images. From early on, the light flooding through the work became the primary element. The pictures glow from within in a mood of calm and serenity that might otherwise only be found in the works of his compatriot Giorgio Morandi. Bathed in a uniformly atmospheric tint, his works seem disembodied and distant.

Antonio Calderara’s watercolours, as in the works presented here: “Untitled” from 1972 and 1973, take this process of dematerialisation one step further. They form a “further progression towards the immaterial” as Erich Franz phrased it in the exhibition catalogue of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur 2017 (Exh. Cat. Antonio Calderara. Kumstmuseum Winterthur, 11 February - 30 April 2017, p.20). “They are devoted to the same themes as his paintings. However, the brightness comes not from the paint but from the paper, which shines through the calmly applied watercolour paint. The colour seems even less material. Here everything is even quieter.” (ibid)

What is decisive alongside the immaterial quality of the colour, is the relationship of the forms to each other, and the way they meet in the pictorial space. The lines meet and draw our attention to the fine nuances, to the nothingness. A colour infused with white is used as contrast, the protruding surface becomes the space in-between. Colour becomes soft immaterial light, a light, hazy, spazio luce which wonderfully dominates the image.