MILAN.- On Thursday, 4 December, A arte Invernizzi gallery opens the solo exhibition by Mario Nigro, curated by Paolo Bolpagni, which will focus on works belonging to the “Spazio totale” [“Total Space”] cycle created between 1952 and 1955.

A leading figure in Italian art after World War II, Mario Nigro (Pistoia, 1917 - Livorno, 1992) developed a radical pictorial language that combined constructive rigor with expressive intensity. His scientific and musical training had a profound influence on his compositional method: his painting is structured according to rhythmic-musical rules of repetition and variation, which generate a continuous tension between order and dissonance, calculation and emotion.

For over a decade (1952-1965/66), “Spazio totale” was the focal point of Nigro’s artistic research: he visualized the interpenetration of different degrees of reality and dimensions obtained through the skilful combination of rhythmic structures with a strong expressive component, deformed by the refined tonal gradations of the background and the expanding grid. The first works belonging to this cycle date back to 1952, to which the artist devoted careful theorization by writing various essays, published between 1954 and 1955.

“[...] I have gained experience from the relations that can really exist between musical structure and abstract construction, problems that had been touched upon repeatedly but never rationally addressed. On the basis of these structures, I studied plastic elements in their forms of repetition, variation, simultaneity and coincidence, thus arriving at the conception of a total space where form and space resolve one another in a move beyond physical two-dimensionality, and where problems of invention, discovery, expression and representation will still exist. [...] The plastic elements aligned in harmony, each having equal functional possibilities within the painting, are still indications of aspiration to a concordant world. The violent contrasts in which the compositional structure originates are signs of an existing struggle.”
(Mario Nigro, Primo scritto sullo spazio totale, 1954)

The works exhibited on the upper floor of the gallery allow for an in-depth and systematic investigation of the generative motifs underlying this cycle: surfaces, lines, interweaving patterns, sequences of signs and colors add up and subtract in an energetic and musical harmony of small squares and colored stripes, giving rise to luminous vibrations and chromatic textures that refer to fabric, architecture, and sound, in an expanded pictorial dimension. In them, space is no longer a background or a container, but a dynamic totality that encompasses form and time, construction and perception. Each “Spazio totale” is a pictorial fragment, unsuitable for defining a totality, despite being aware of it. With it, Nigro aspires to make visible that it is not possible to construct a closed system, but only an open and confused whole, where each component is free and expresses movement, but not resolution. For this reason, the variations of “Spazio totale” from 1952 to 1955 are innumerable, because they represent a method of investigation, not an answer. The aspiration is to immerse oneself, not to separate oneself from the surrounding world.

The lower floor displays representative works that highlight the artist’s analysis of the issues and implications of space, arriving at a conception of painting as an act of knowledge and a concept of reality, where form does not represent but coincides with space itself. Nigro investigates the dynamics of perception by analyzing the relationships between form, color, and structure in a construction that tends to become an environment, an energy field, a place of simultaneity and visual coincidences: the plastic elements are repeated, vary, and contribute to forming a whole in which form and space resolve each other, both in structural and chromatic terms.

Over the decades since Mario Nigro’s death in 1992, major retrospectives have been organized in numerous museums, including the Institut Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt (2000), the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (2006), Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (2012), the Fondazione Ragghianti in Lucca (2017), Kunstmuseum Bochum (2019) and, most recently, the Palazzo Reale and Museo del Novecento in Milan (2023). The catalogue raisonné, edited by Germano Celant, was published in 2009.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue with an essay by Paolo Bolpagni, the reproductions of the artworks on display and an updated bio-bibliographic section.