“My works are full of structures - these structures are structures of my conscience”.

From 1946, when he signed the Oltre Guernica (Beyond Guernica) manifesto and was one of the founders of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, into the early 1950s, when he formed part of the Otto Pittori Italiani group, Emilio Vedova guided his painting towards a horizon of committing to and clashing with reality. According to Luisa Somaini, this was motivated by his “…awareness of the proud position of non-alignment, of enunciation of a crisis that was not only political but also pertained to humans and scholars in the years […] of the ‘cold war’.”¹ In keeping his distance from all forms of realism, Vedova found his roots in the dynamism of Boccioni, comparing it with the prescriptive grammar of Cubist ascendance that characterised the stringent black-and-white paintings of that abstract-concrete season. In 1953, with Ciclo della protesta (Cycle of Protest) and Ciclo della natura (Cycle of Nature) and the abandonment of all spatial framing, his paintings announced a new consonance with Abstract Expressionism. The artist used to indicate the early point of origin of the gestural turning point in his drawings of 1935-37, in which the figures are “…cores of energy in expansion”.² The sense of this passage was clarified definitively between 1959 and 1961, with the large asymmetrical canvases in the Scontro di situazioni (Clash of Situations) cycle, exhibited in Venice in the Vitalità nell’arte exhibition, with the individual room that won him the Painting Prize at the XXX Biennale, and with the sets for Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza ’60, presented at the Teatro La Fenice in April 1961. It was “…a gesturalism that needed to become an integral part of its space, an articulate, tentacular gesturalism.”³ 

The next stage was the Plurimi (Multiples) of 1962-63. In these paintings/sculptures, irregular wooden supports painted on both sides and joined by hinges or ropes, developed three-dimensionally to penetrate the space and offer the viewer the possibility of crossing through them both visually and otherwise, as part of a process that culminated in the L’assurdo diario di Berlino (Absurd Berlin Diary) in 1964. In the process of inventing the Plurimi, an important part was played by the constant exercise of chromatic and gestural experiences in a number of parallel series, dedicated to Korea or Spain, or identified by dates, and developed with a diary-style rhythm and intent. These included Ciclo ’61 (Cycle ’61) to which the piece in the Cerruti Collection belongs, with the pictorial matter incorporating sheets of newspaper in several points on its surface. The observations made by the principal interpreters of that crucial passage in Vedova’s research apply to this work. Giulio Carlo Argan was the first to write about the Plurimi for the 1963 exhibition at the Galleria Marlborough in Rome: “The image can occur here, there, anywhere, […] the space is full of signs, of calls, of alarms”⁴ - and Werner Haftmann, who had already invited Vedova to the first Documenta in Kassel in 1955, presented a retrospective of his work at the Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden in 1964 - “Every event is transposed into direct gesture, the evocative trace of which is committed to expressive sign.”⁵ Meanwhile, Vedova sought to distance himself from Art Informel, stating in 1963 in Il Verri: “My works are full of structures - these structures are structures of my conscience”.⁶ 

The Ciclo ’61 canvases were only exhibited from the late 1970s onwards, particularly in the anthropological exhibitions curated in 1981 by Argan and Maurizio Calvesi in San Marino,⁷ and by Jürgen Schilling in Braunschweig.⁸ The work in the Cerruti Collection was no exception, exhibited for the first time at the Castello in Portofino in 1978,⁹ and then in Braunschweig in 1981. A renewed interest in that phase characterised the Emilio Vedova 1961 & 1984 exhibition in 2010, organised by the Fondazione Vedova in the Magazzino del Sale alle Zattere in Venice, where the comparison between the works from Ciclo ’61 and Ciclo ’62 and paintings from the Scarabocchi dell’anima (Scrawls of the Soul, 1982) and Di umano ’84 (On Human ’84) series highlighted the elements of continuity and the reciprocal resonances.¹⁰ 

Maria Teresa Roberto 

¹ L. Somaini, “Otto pittori italiani 1952-1954”, in Milan 1986, pp. 7-28 (cit. pp. 22-23).

² E. Vedova, “Auszug auf Notizen in Skizzenbuchernzu der ersten ‘plurimi’”, in Munich 1964, English translation “From Study/Books to Plurimi. 1961-1965”, in Rivoli 1998-99, pp. 65-71 (cit. p. 67).

³ Ibid., p. 65.

⁴ G. C. Argan, “I ‘plurimi’ di Vedova”, in Rome 1963-64, np.

⁵ W. Haftmann, in Baden-Baden 1964-65, np., English translation in Rivoli 1998-99, pp. 202-203 (cit. p. 203).

⁶ Vedova 1962, pp. 83-93. As regards the critical debate see M. V. Marini Clarelli, “Le strutture della coscienza. Vedova e il dibattito sull’Informale, 1958-62”, in Rome-Berlin 2007-08, pp. 21-25.

⁷ San Marino 1981.

⁸ Braunschweig 1981-82.

⁹ Portofino 1978. The catalogue focuses on the documentation of the most recent, and at that date unpublished, Multiples from the Laceration cycle, presented in the show..

¹⁰ Emilio Vedova 1961 & 1984, exhibition without catalogue (Venice, Magazzino del Sale alle Zattere, 4 December 2010 - 1 May 2011), curated by the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation.