“Can a painted form also have significance in terms of appearance? Can the strictly formal organism of a painting contain the lightness and breath of an evocation, a sudden jolt of the memory? This, for me, is the problem. Herein lies the continuous restlessness that drives me to paint.”

The tenor and strong internal cohesion of Afro’s work, which were widely recognised from the painter’s mature phase onwards, are rooted around some of his recurring features: the Venetian-style tonal colouring, deriving from his education and cultural background, the slow and knowledgeable processuality of the hand, which also owes a debt to the family’s artisanal tradition (his father Leo was a decorator) and a latent memorial quality which become a real calling card of his painting that would develop its own lyrical abstraction, while also remaining tied to figurative resonance. A reference to the importance of memory in his research is also explained in a text from 1954, entitled “Indicazioni sulla mia pittura” (Notes on My Painting), which is almost a poetic declaration: “Can a painted form also have significance in terms of appearance? Can the strictly formal organism of a painting contain the lightness and breath of an evocation, a sudden jolt of the memory? This, for me, is the problem. Herein lies the continuous restlessness that drives me to paint.”¹ 

The career of the painter from Friuli, who completed his studies firstly in Venice and then in Florence, began in the early 1930s in Rome where, through his acquaintance with Scipione, Mario Mafai and Corrado Cagli, he drew close to the expressive manner of the Roman School. Until at least 1947, he deviated from the early lesson he received from Cagli, looking to painting in the style of Picasso and Cubism, when he drew close to Renato Birolli and Ennio Morlotti whom he had met during his time in Milan. 

As the 1940s drew to an end, after not adhering to the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti or participating in the Venice Biennale in 1948, Afro distanced himself from the disputes between abstract and realist painters in Italy and looked to new experiences, planning a trip to the United States. Following his first eight-month stay in New York in 1950, he established a longstanding and important partnership with the gallery owner Catherine Viviano, whom he had met in Rome the previous year, and he became the first of that generation of young Italian artists in the post-war period to receive comprehensive acclaim from critics and the international market, going on to maintain a solid trading position with other countries. 

Catherine Viviano was an assistant to Pierre Matisse for many years. Her business was strongly oriented towards European painting, setting up the all- Italian exhibition 5 Italian Painters in her New York gallery in 1950,² which was followed in the spring by Afro’s first solo show in New York. 

His painting Untitled, 1952, also dates to his first visits to America. It went from Catherine Viviano’s gallery to the collection of Dorothy G. Koss and was purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti in 2001 from the Galleria d’Arte Nuova Gissi in Turin. In 1952, while Viviano was working on his second solo exhibition, a shift was recorded in the fulcrum of Afro’s references. Having overcome his musings on post-Cubism, he was now inclined towards para-surrealist references. 

In the centre of the canvas in the Cerruti Collection we see an abstract but hybrid shape with organic and biomorphic characteristics, which emerges forcefully from the background because of its luminosity, coordinated by a network of pictorial signs and graphic filaments, which work together to structure and dilate the physiology of the image. In the counterpoint of the primary and repeated sign, we can read the main reference to surrealist graphic automatism, which in the case of Afro derived primarily from his admiration of the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky, who had influenced the painter’s work since his first trip to America. He famously acknowledged his debt to him in the presentation he wrote on the occasion of Gorky’s solo exhibition at the Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome in 1957: 

“When I went to America for the first time, in 1950, I saw lots of paintings by Gorky. It was the most important experience of that first trip […] that painting gave me courage. Intrepid, excited and full of love, Arshile Gorky taught me to seek my truth without false shame, without ambitions or formalistic qualms. From this, more than from anything else, I learned to look solely inside myself: where the images are still rooted to their obscure origins, to their unconscious sincerity.”³ 

The painting is also associated with two pieces in watercolour, gouache and pencil, which testify to Afro’s habit of practising on paper and its complicity with the painted work (figs. 1, 2). Indeed, from his formative years all the way through to his maturity, Afro maintained a slow and strict style of working that probes the image, before transferring it to painting, sometimes through a multiple series of variants on paper, as in the case of the preparatory cartoons for the large mural The Garden of Hope, commissioned from him in 1958 for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. 

Laura Cantone

¹ A. Basaldella, “Indicazioni sulla mia pittura”, typewritten text in the Archivio eredi Afro Basaldella in Rome, consulted in Caramel 1989, p. 151.

² 5 Italian Painters, New York, Catherine Viviano Gallery, January-February 1950. Corrado Cagli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti and Armando Pizzinato exhibited alongside Afro.

³ Arshile Gorky, Rome, Galleria dell’Obelisco, 1957.