Toti Scialoja,

There have been many initiatives in the past aimed at documenting the work of Toti Scialoja, from the beginnings under the banner of an expressionism characterized by a lyrical declination to the broad gestural drafts of the 1980s and 1990s. If the important exhibition set up at Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome in 1991 considered the entire path of his research, on other occasions the attention was paid to the most recent production, omitting the analysis of significant previous periods.

An exhibition with an unusual and particular feature was therefore considered of great interest. The show was centered on the painting by Toti Scialoja between 1955 and 1963, in the years when, involved in abstract-concrete experiences and in tune with the results of overseas art, he shattered the image and freed it from naturalistic contents, to recompose the contents in a whirling dynamism of signs or according to the rhythmic scanning of a constant module. The exhibition was held in Verona at Galleria dello Scudo from December 5, 1999 to February 13, 2000, under the patronage of the Municipality Department of Culture, City of Verona, and Fondazione Toti Scialoja, Rome, as part of a project dedicated to Italian abstract art after World War II, started with the exhibitions dedicated to Afro and Renato Birolli in 1989 and 1990.

With a selection of thirty paintings from Fondazione Toti Scialoja, the strictly scientific exhibition highlights how, after the neo-Cubist season that characterized the 1940s, in the following decade the artist achieved a freedom of expression close to the language of the great Americans Kline and de Kooning. The exhibition path was introduced by some works from 1955, such as La Caccia n. 1 or Il sonno di un’ora, tuned according to a skillful register of dark earths and leaden grays: flashes of light turn on and immediately die under the crossed blows of a forcefully vibrated stroke that cancels the last fleeting narrative link. In Ostaggio and Sovrapposto, of the following year, the gesture invades the pictorial field without explicitly assuming any fixed meaning. The use of anti-canonic pigments and raw hemp as a support confirms the definitive liberation from the preciousness implicit in oil and tempera painting.