Old presses

Angelo Savelli, painting in white
Source: La Repubblica

26 June 1995

Prato – Angelo Savelli had a long life and a long career; but he was a lonely wanderer, stranger to groups or parties, unwilling to limit his research with aggressive theorizations and to gain from his image. He left an imperfect memory of himself and of his thoughts about art, somehow resembling his light step in the world, his enchanted and dreamy speech, unrelated to the quality and the weight of his painting.

He died a few weeks ago: a few days before the Biennale di Venezia finally dedicated a personal room to him, and just before the PecciMuseum in Prato inaugurated a great exhibition that for the first time would try – not an easy feat – to sum up so many decades of untiring diligence.

Today the exhibition opens (prepared by Antonella Soldaini; catalogue from Charta with an essay by Flaminio Gualdoni) and maybe now he is talking to Dante, Vergil, Socrates, Plato and "other luminaries", as he was set to do as soon as he passed "into the other dimension"; and he leaves us with this exhibition, an idea that had enchanted him.

Maybe he was figuring the astonishment of its visitors. Few people indeed were fully conscious of his whole work. Some remembered his first years in the Fifties when, back from Paris, together with Turcato or Dorazio, he created in Rome the beginnings of a new abstraction, uniting futuristic memories and cosmopolite renewal. And of course some knew of his subsequent trips to the USA, of his ties with Jack Tworkow and Motherwell, of his meetings with Kline and De Kooning, of his closeness with Reinhardt's and Newman's researches; lastly, of his life in New York and his discovery of white as the only colour, or rather the only light, in painting.

But Savelli would perhaps cheerfully point out the traces of his ancient education received from Ferrazzi in the early Thirties; or he might tell how he brightened with warm expressionism the painting in Rome in the years after the war, with Scialoja, Stradone and Sadun; exhibiting with them in a memorable room of the Fifth Quadriennale, in 1948.

And he would talk affectionately of his "environments", imagined between his seventies and his eighties, from Paradise 1 to Tree with 84 Tree Trunks. These environments were not an escape towards a sensational dramatization of the aesthetic experience: he grasped the most immaterial nature of his white colour, less bound to the heavy, blatant corporeity of traditional painting, and closer to an idea.

An idea, however, that Savelli always saw as inclination of feeling rather than cold expression of a purely rational project. So the immensity and infinity of the space he was always talking about -and that he sought in white, always widening his non-colour in the environment – were not a demonstrable certainty for him, but an adventurous dream, able to centuplicate imagination and intellectual freedom for those who found themselves wrapped up in that white.

Author: Fabrizio D'Amico

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