Giuseppe Santomaso. Pittura Animata

Giuseppe Santomaso, a fundamental figure in the art of the second half of the 20th century, succeeded in wedding the most radical developments of its great international avant-garde movements with the age-old Venetian traditions in painting and the handling of light. Focused on his activity between 1948, the year of his participation of the first postwar Venice Biennale, and his death in 1990, the monograph presents crucial points in a creative trajectory that saw him established as one of the pioneers in the international revitalization of modern painting. Santomaso was one of the earliest and most important practitioners of non-figurative painting in the Italy of the 1940s as well as one of the driving forces, together with figures like Afro Basaldella and Emilio Vedova, of radical artistic movements such as the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and the Gruppo degli Otto. His aim was to recreate the dynamics of reality, through painting, in both physical and emotive terms, giving birth to images – always evocative and never definitive – that seem to take shape in the very moment that we behold them. The result is painting “animated” by constant vibration in which every technical, formal, compositional, and chromatic element combines to capture the distilled image that we form of life and experience through the senses and the emotions, purified by filtering through thought and the imagination.