Francesco Lo Savio

Lo Savio becomes one of the most preeminent figures on international art scene in the second half of the 20^th century, but his work remained in relative obscurity for a number of decades due to both his premature death at the age of 28 and also the difficulty in classifying a body of work deemed too radical at the time and, consequently, misunderstood. Today he is considered one of the key precursors to American Minimalism and conceptual art in Europe.

In just five years, he goes from producing paintings with certain principles of Informalism, still dominant in Italy at the time he becomes an artist, to radically breaking away from this great tradition as he invents a new language, way ahead of its time, that foresees American - Minimalist - explorations that would later define the Sixties. Theatre is one characteristic that marks the rudimentary schism between art at the beginning of this decade as it sees Lo Savio interlink the ideals of design and futurist and constructivist architecture on one side, and other forms and a sensorial rhetoric that portrays the theatre of baroque art on the other. Both interpretations encompass the surmounting of conventional limits of art established after the Second World War.

Lo Savio's sculptures, monochrome paintings and works on metal plates, concerned with the experimentation of space, materials and forms as well as light and installations, are strongly influenced by Lucio Fontana. Operating on the edge of monochrome, his paintings are titled Spazio-Luce (Space-Light), his explorations Filtri (Filters) and his metal works Metalli (Metals), in which deep black combines painting and sculpture with baroque-like folds and curves in an extraordinary play on light. Finally, Lo Savio's Articolizioni totali works - cubes of white plaster with curved sheets of black metal inserted - were exhibited at the end of 1962 and were so innovative at the time that they were universally misconstrued.