Franco Bemporad
Senza titolo, 1960
oil on canvas, 147 × 295 cm
After participating in the "Movimento Nucleare", Bemporad was part of the "Continuità" group, and from this moment on he dedicated himself to signic painting, close to those researches that in Italy participated, as protagonists, in the declinations of the Informal. In the case of Bemporad, and as the work in the Collection exemplifies well, it is a poetics based on repetition and at the same time on the repetition of the pictorial sign, both potentially infinite. The sign is given in proliferations of equal, but never identical, elements: these are never mechanically elaborated modules but discrete elements forming part of an organic whole, but each bearing a diversity (in size, colour). The large oil on canvas that we see has a surface entirely dotted with vertical pictorial segments, alternately red and black, all bearing a small white dot in the centre. The segments vary in height and are linked in linear series, which in turn form boxes connected to each other by short horizontal sections. Series and boxes take on an irregular pattern and structure due to the dimensional variations of the segments, making the grid that is formed and covers the entire surface dynamic.
from: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. La Collezione permanente, exhibition catalogue, edited by G. Verzotti, A. Vettese, Milano, Skira, 2007, p. 174.
