Francesco Lo Savio. Esperienze pittoriche post-informali a Roma

The artistic career of Francesco Lo Savio begins at the dawn of the sixties in Rome when the city is in a culturally active and receptive phase. Lo Savio is actively participated in the revolution of young artists who aimed to detach themselves from the previous informal culture in order to develop a new mechanism of construction of the art works. To this aim, it is necessary to examine Lo Savio’s path within the Roman cultural context with the aim of determining the reception of international artistic experiences in the Roman area. The spread in Rome of abstract expressionism has a great impact on the pictorial choices made by the artist in the first phase of his career, between 1957 and 1959 and remains an important starting point for all young Roman artists in those years. In particular, work of Mark Rothko is an important element in Rome in the last three years of the decade. Rothko’s paintings are appreciated by Lo Savio and the younger generation of Roman artists for the intrinsic properties of the pictorial space and for the atmospheric use of color that open a debate on the possibilities expressive potentialities of a pictorial surface. At the same time, Lo Savio is related to the great European movement Zero. A season that takes place between 1959 and 1963 characterized by the creativity of the new generation of young European artists who aimed to overcome the quicksand of the informal by proposing themselves as a compact front for a renewed artistic conception. At this moment Lo Savio meets the main protagonists of the huge international network of Zero: in Milan Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, founders of the magazine Azimuth and the gallery Azimut; in Düsseldorf the members of the group Zero, Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker and in Leverkusen the critic Udo Kultermann who invited him, in the spring of 1960, to participate in the exhibition Monochrome Malerei. This is a fundamental groundbreaking group exhibition for the theme of monochrome in Europe. This choice places Lo Savio in contrast with the Roman friends who were instead making choices oriented to the reinterpretation of American culture of abstract expressionism before and, even more, of pop art later. Within this wide, articulated and extremely complex context, the career of Francesco Lo Savio moves between 1958 and 1962. Lo Savio’s work is articulated through his personal pictorial theory based on the dynamic relationship between light and space. These two factors are the basis of his work. A production that, within the research, is divided into different moments because it is based entirely on the continuous study of the luminous and spatial components of the work: 1. Spazio-Luce paintings since 1959 2. Filtri between late 1959 and early 1960 3. Metalli since 1960 4. Articolazioni totali since 1962 5. Progetti architettonici (Maison au soleil) between 1962 and 1963 My research theme analyzes the individual groups of works in their specificity highlighting the subtle but fundamental differences that occur in the transition from one group to another. It is possible to understand the evolution of Lo Savio’s work and his obsession to understand and articulate, in a different way, through his works, the space-light process. The groups are analyzed following a chronological development in order to identify not only the main points of the artist’s research but also framing them within a very intricate and varied international cultural context. [edited by Author]