CAGLIARI .- The exhibition “Il Canto Sospeso della Pittura” “The suspended song of painting” curated by Claudio Cerritelli was inaugurated at the Cagliari Palazzo di Città.

The exhibition produced by the Council Office for the Arts and Culture of the Municipality of Cagliari and strongly desired by the Councillor of Culture M.Dolores Picciau, in collaboration with the Gastone Biggi Foundation, is a large retrospective dedicated to the Roman painter.

On the 4 floors of the City Palace the exhibition unfolds with 130 painting which, covering a chronological period from the late 50s to 2014, retraces the moments of the Master’s artistic and technical evolution. The painter, who passed away on 29th September 2014, was also a poet, musicologist, writer, essayist, and his cultural multiplicity is what distinguishes is artistic production that has crossed the twentieth century up to the new millennium as a precious witness of a century of history among the most changeable and full of events of the human existence.

In his human and artistic path Gastone Biggi, who with his pictorial activity participated in numerous solo exhibition in Italy and abroad as well as in the most famous Biennials and Quadrennials, he never interrupted the teaching of artistic subjects at the Liceo Artistico in Rome until the 1984, highlighting the intimated need to teach the love of knowledge.

The exhibition “The suspended song of painting” on display until May 04, 2022 “given the multiplicity of the cultural contributions of Biggi, is a valuable opportunity to give to Cagliari an international dimension with the rediscovery of one of the greatest Masters of contemporary art”, says the Councillor and Entertainment Maria Dolores Picciau.

At the City Palace, the poetics of Gastone Biggi is divided into sections:

- The Figuratives

In a chronological period between 1947 and 1957 we can indentify in the figurative phase, the preparatory period in the Biggi’s artwork, which through these paintings glimpses the “Racconto” “Tale” representation understood as the possibility to summarize the objective data by pressing towards abstraction.

- The Fences (Gates)

From 1957 onward Biggi will realize the Fences. The term is improperly coined by “critics” while the artist will define them iron stories, thus metaphorical indicating a compact image like that of a gate.

- Informal

In the period 1958- 1962 Gastone Biggi focuses on a pictorial synthesis with adherence to the informal through the series of stories (Sands and multi-materials), Times and Letters. In the Time cycle he uses the technique of the colour casting guiding the fall, distinguishing himself from the personal dripping to the one used by other artists.

- Continuum - Continui

Continui was born between 1962 and 1966, graphic experimentation on the relationship between dot and white spaces, writings based on the signs that the artist will start to numerate (Continui Segnici) (Signs Continuum). From this moment the monad point will become the unit of measurement in the canvas and the distinctive icon on his painting. Starting from the theories of perceptions Biggi designs a whole system of signs, where the relationship between points and ground, their rhythm or distance has to be carefully controlled.

Among the artworks belonging to the Contemporary Art Collection of the Civic Museums of Cagliari,

now exposed at the protected promenade of the Bastione Saint Remy is Biggi’s work, Continuo 80, a tempera on canvas dated 1963, where the dot is “the element that becomes form and the sign capable to create the pictorial surface, according to «a point like texture» that emerges white from a black ground overwhelming the painting field”

- Variables

The evolution of space research will lead Biggi to the Variable cycle (1966.1975), where near to the point of Continuum will appear the square, as a unit measure and also as a canonical code in the relationship between planes.

- Tangentials and Rhythms




At the end of 70s Biggi starts to have some doubts about the effectiveness of the painted space and therefore begins to work on the frame, on the border, on the Tangentials cycle (1975-1976), the term of which alludes to the tangency of the points at the centre of the canvas and pass to the margin. In Ritmi (Rhythms), a series of 1978, the presence of “points” returns, distributed in alternating and regular sequences, in order to make predominantly dark or shadowed backgrounds vibrate.

- Skies - Days

The two splendid parallel series of Skies and Days (Cieli e Giorni), painted between 1978 and 1986, will include paintings in which Gastone Biggi with vinyl colours and wax crayons paints dots that look like stars. The series of Skies marks the recovery of colours, already begun in the polychrome Variables. In the cycle of Days, crepuscular silhouettes, nebulous atmospheres and nocturnal ghosts appears.

- Campi Fields

In this Cycle produces in 1986 – 1987, Biggi who opted for the horizontal format, abandoned the “punctiform” technique in favour of colour: the dot becomes a line.

- Songs of Memory

The series of “Canti della Memoria” Songs of memory, also called the series of madness is a group of artworks, usually squared, where the informal matrix is dominant. Realized in a particular period of the artist’s life – as he himself wrote – they are imbued “a rebellious gesture and an almost violent colours”

- Luci Lights

In 1989 Biggi begins to question the geometric structure and he paints artworks on light.
The structural weight of the “points” fades away to make room for the emotion of total colour.

- Constellation Tabulae

In 1991 Biggi works on the Tabulae cycle where the space is filled by a series of points that, appear as a whole, to be Roman printouts whose names also occur: Tabula minima, tabula Gaelic, tabula nigra. Between the 1991 and 1995 he created the Constellation having the firmament as their theme.

- Icons

In 1995 Biggi began working on the Icons cycle, rediscovering the sands used in the past and looking to Giotto as a model to evoke the sense of affresco. In these artworks is put on evidence the lesson of Paul Klee and Vasilij Kandinskij on the concept of colour as a symbol of memory, of remembrance of places and emotions, while from the Russian artist Kasimir Malevic he takes the metaphysical meaning of white as a counterpoint to black.

- Cosmocromie

Between 2000 and 2004 Biggi created paintings that where borne from the cancellation of what he had done previously. The artist in fact began to erase the surfaces of these artworks and on the texture, which he interprets as a sort of cosmos, he draws continuous brushstrokes, taking inspiration by contemporary models such as Rothko, Tobey, Gorky, Motherwell, Pollock, Kline.

- Events

Since 2005, Gastone Biggi has been working on two cycles of large-scale artworks entitled Eventi and divided into two parts: War (Guerra) and Peace (Pace). Some works in the war series are inspired to the Iraqi war, others to the Second World War with the atomic bomb. In the peace series, the artist wanted to tell the flow of rivers, the love of bodies the liveliness of parties.

- Ayron

This serie of 2007 takes it’s title from a fantasy story that Biggi wrote inspired by the fly of the heron. These are paintings in which the artist spreads a background of variegated colour on which he carves overlapping oval or circular marks, creating a graphic texture of colour.

- Puntocromie, New York 3, Fleurs, Scores

“Give me a dot and I will paint you the world” said Gastone Biggi and the dot became also in the last period the main expressive code of the story in the four final cycles of his life.