In spazio rosso tensione interrotta. 1972.
Oil on panel.
Signed, dated, titled, inscribed "28010 A mano per Vaciago" and with the measurements on the reverse. 27 : 24 cm (10,6 : 9,4 in). After his first one-man exhibition in 1923 Antonio Calderara broke off his studies in engineering in 1925, which he had begun in Milan two years earlier, in favour of painting, which he had pursued alongside at first. As an autodidact Calderara was a painter who experimented a great deal, attempting various different styles between the 1930s and late 1950s. His oeuvre includes still life in a quiet meditative style as well as landscapes and figurative scenes in an Impressionist style and portraits in the manner of the "Neue Sachlichkeit". Searching for his own artistic expression, the misty landscape of Lake Orta - where he lived for several decades - became his favourite subject. Gradually, in reaching a higher degree of abstraction in his Lake Orta landscapes, Calderara finally abandoned landscapes and architecture and discovered a completely abstract world in which reality is apparent only as a memory. According to the artist himself, he painted his first purely abstract work in 1959. From this period onwards he developed an abstract style in pastel colours, which is reminiscent of works by Joseph Albers. Numbers and proportions liek e.g. the principle of the Golden Section were of great importance to Calderara. The artist called his geometric approach the "spazio mentale", "mental space". He differs from other Constructivists and "art concrète" artists in that he had no strictly radical concepts or colour schemes - despite all his systematics - but was partly guided by intuition. Calderara described his artistic intention with the words: "I want to paint nothingness, the void, which is the whole, silence, light, order, harmony. The infinite."

“Calderara’s pictures owe their simplicity of form and palette to their genuinely unique poetry. The techniques he uses – oil, watercolour and silkscreen printing – have something wholly spiritual about them and his composition unites stringency and extreme subtlety. In visual counterpoint he seeks a form of expression corresponding to music; that counterpoint reveals his desire to create visual polyphony from form and colour, in which the beauty of rhythms in musical harmony predominate” (Jörg Walter Koch, in: Antonio Calderara. Bilder, Aquarelle und Grafik, Exhib.cat. Karlsruhe 1972, n. p.).

Antonio Calderara lived in Milan and Vaciago until his death in 1978. [ME]

PROVENIENZ: Private collection Rhineland.

In good condition. Upper edge and corners partly negligibly rubbed.