[...] up to 1956, Antico takes the habit to consign his loneliness to his drawings - noted down in ink, at first on loose sheets - telling about his longing for the water’s edge, the voice of the backwash and sketching from time to time ships, boats and the fishing-nets. [...]
[...] Loose sheets bekome numerous bound note-books, ink is accompanied by different graphic instruments. Some of the drawings dated to 1955, are realized with crayon, analyzing the contrast of the cromatic multitudes: they are fields of force constructed with the colour, implying the comprehension of historic avant-guarde, from the dynamic synthesis of Boccioni up to the evocative intensity of Marc. But it is most of all the drammatic forcing of symbolistic and expressionist foundation concerning the immages realized during the second half of the fifties. [...]
[...] he feels the unsuppressible desire for the sea, in 1958 he signed on as cadet on an oil-tanker, travelling along the Americas for more than one year. The crossings are still full of thoughts, of death and love but the smell of tar and oakum on the deck begins to mix with the perfume of exotic lands. The first paintings - executed with oil on unbleached canvas recovered on board - with subjects like Apparizioni (1958) and Caraibi (1959) lay the stress on a new and positive impulse, brought about by the meeting with other places and other people. After a short stop in Cagliari, Antico leaves again for the East, lands in Singapore and in the Persian Gulf. Than again Australia and New Zealand. Finally Japan, hoped for for a long time. Fed by the fascination of far away cultures, grows in an elective affinity the passion for ideograms, for calligraphy, suitable to describe flashes of light, as already known by Van Gogh and confirmed by the painting of signs by Mathieu. An important period opens to experimentation and a profound meditation, linked to the oriental philosophy. |
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The syncopated and tense rhythm, the nervous signs leave progressively the place for a teem of swift and filiform strokes, drenched with a new will for life and knowledge. From many designs disappears any mimetic intention, only plots of lines that interlace with ink spots. Contrary to the tradition of the horror vacui and respecting the concept of sunija, large parts of the sheet are often left free, recalling the fascination of the absence in the tea-room and in a large part of Japanese architecture. Also in the paintings, the ascendancy of the ideographic writing changes into the invention of lines that now pose as vaguely anthropomorphous forms: the sinous bodies of Danzatrici (1960) can be recognized or the actors of an ominous gait stripping the flesh from the fiery red of the Tramonto (1960). Or still again the damned to the tragic procession of Fame (1961), painted after his return to Italy, at Arco di Trento, where Antico lived some months to be near his friend Zandarin. Certainly there is the peremptory persistence of his inclination to expressionism, an expressionism balanced between figuration and abstraction. Hallucinated presences in metamorphosis come up again in Incubi (1960), becoming agitated by a violent chromatism; and the Figure Indiane (1960) are within an uproar of black arabesques. But there is also, in becoming a different energy, less involved by existentialism. A spontaneous flow of communication with nature. The gestural component never is uncontrolled instinct but longing for an absolute contemporaneity between thought and action, and for a true spiritual expression. In any case, the thin outlines, that are result of a profoundly interiorized union between East and West are the characterizing key of an original expressive manner. [...]
Simona Campus
2004 |
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