ANTONIO CALDERARA

Provenance:
- Estate Antonio and Carmela Calderara, Vacciago/Italien.
- Galerie Stefan Hildebrandt, St. Moritz.

Exhibition: Lugano 2016/2017, Antonio Calderara - Una lece senza ombre. Museo d'arte Svizzera italiana, 2 October 2016 - 22 January 2017, cat. p. 104/105.

“I would like to paint nothingness, that nothing which is everything, silence, light, space”. This sentence, which the exceptional Italian artist Antonio Calderara formulated in his book “Pagine” in 1973, fittingly describes his intentions as a painter. Beyond the distinction between representational and non-representational, he wishes to depict the essential. In order to do justice to this goal, in his painting he goes to the very limits, even of the visible. “The essential” is a big word, which is hard to comprehend and even harder to depict. Yet it points in that decisive direction, refers to something separate, something tied to place and time, which Calderara translates into his abstract pictorial space called “Spazio Mentale”.

Calderara’s shift towards abstraction at the end of the 1950s was not at all sudden. Rather it was consistent with the development of a road already taken. The formal vocabulary, which he uses in the non-representational works, was already present in his representational works. Very soon that light which floods everything becomes a primary element in his pictures. The pictures glow from within with a calm and serenity otherwise seen only perhaps in the work of his compatriot Giorgio Morandi. Clad in a harmoniously atmospheric shading, his works have a disembodied and distant effect. No brush stroke can be seen. Employing a drawn-out working method, with countless, small movements, the individual brush stroke builds up to form a translucent, melting colour surface. The pictures appear to dissolve into a haze, into nothing, like a fine note, which is struck gently and delicately and emits its energy in the surrounding silence.

Antonio Calderara’s watercolours, such as the ones presented here, “Untitled” from 1973/74, take the process of dematerialisation one step further from that of the oil paintings. They form a “further escalation towards the immaterial” as Erich Franz put it in the current exhibition catalogue of the Winterthur Kunstmuseum. “They are dedicated to the same themes. Yet the luminosity comes not from the colour but from the paper, which shines through the calmly applied watercolour paint. The colour has the effect of being even less tangible. Here everything is even stiller.” (Exh. Cat.: Antonio Calderara, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 11 February - 1 May 2017, p.20)

Our watercolours illustrate in exemplary fashion the second central theme in Calderara: the encounter. The small square encounters the stripes or rods, the surrounding surface. So, the relationship is altered depending on the perspective. Often the square turns up in a very small format. As in the present works, it stands out through the accent colour. The eye captures the square as the prominent form and remains with it. The artist often nominates the theme in the title: “Attrazione quadrata” and thereby clarifies the approach to the pictorial object. The point of attraction influences the entire picture, becomes the centre, the focus of energy for the whole. The colour is a gentle immaterial light and together they engender “Spazio Luce” – an airy shimmering light space.