Interview appeared in the section : “Armonia, Arte, Sport” in the newspaper Italia Sera on Thursday 17 January 2013.
The apartment is in a historic condominium complex typical of the Prati district in Rome. With a well-kept internal courtyard, plants and bicycles with baskets. In that apartment there is an artist’s studio. So, in summary: a house among houses, lunchtime, the offices of accountants, lawyers and notaries, a dentist’s surgery and a painter. Who opens the door for me smiling and immediately makes me sit down in his studio, in that corner, contained and discreet, where he has his easel and his colours. A studio with all the trappings. The vases with the brushes, the tubes of paint and the dirty palette. The smell of oil and turpentine of the canvas in progress.
Antonio Anastasia intrigues me, because he started painting when he was just fifteen, at the beginning of the 60s and in 1968 he was already exhibiting around forty works in his first one-man show in Maglie at the “Circolo Culturale Friends Club”: later, due to force major, he devoted himself mainly to graphics. Almost exclusively for Alitalia, where he was responsible for the ICARUS project for automated cartography, helping to give prestige to our national airline at European level. I stop, I tell him: this is your most important work by pointing to one! And he tells me no, it’s not like that. His most important work is, perhaps, the least visible. For example “Lost love (to my wife)”, which is a yellow sphere between colors. Just as that happy abstract, “Pensiero d’Amore” are for his wife
A painful memory, which however was the push to take refuge with energy and passion in painting, his true profession, and to resume with enthusiasm that search for a new pictorial technique that began in the 70s. His very personal “Abstract Expressionism “, a mix between Abstract, Informal, Dripping and Spaziassimo. He tries to express all his malaise towards a society that she considers sick, but told only and exclusively through color, without images, in complete freedom. He arrived at this only after many years of research and destroyed canvases and an intuition that proved successful after a sleepless night.
He tells me that during the execution of an Abstract work (which he produces only in his country house because of the space) he becomes extraneous, isolated, no contact. In his laboratory full of glazes and canvases in the morning silence he paints, there is only him, lots of space to move around, the colors and the surface on which to give life to a thought, an idea through the movement and the amalgam of the glazes guided by the spatula and his fingers, which give rise to those admired extraordinary chromatic effects, impossible to achieve with a brush.
There is a lot of order in his studio in Rome as in the whole “gallery house”. His works are hung and stacked everywhere in protected rooms, there are also those executed directly on the glass, which represent the beginning of abstract research and which certainly characterize him and, most of all, those that he likes to call “cubist/futurist”. : these are canvases divided geometrically in which no, there is no real cubism. The shape is not “opened” on the surface but is rather segmented into areas of different colours, with a fascinating and full, compact use of primary colours. Every space is filled. This whole thing sounds nice, as I see his Cubist / Futurist works finally live.
“Why do you call still lifes “Composition of still lifes”? Or “Musical composition and tropical flowers”, “Composition with ivy”. Why this term “composition”, I tell him.
“Because the objects are placed in a space falsely, I decide the scene like a director and portray them. I’m the one who puts together some musical instruments and some flowers. “This juxtaposition would not otherwise exist in nature”. The linearity of this logic is unsettling. As are some older youthful paintings. Brutally simple, vaguely elementary, but enthusiastic, happy. The sunsets, those of the poets.
“Yes, but” I continue while postponing his kind invitation to have lunch together “which are the works that really represent you. Which ones, the ones of which you could say: “this is me”? ”.
“These,” he says as he points a finger at a large panel in the hallway. It is a large panel, about three meters high and one hundred and twenty wide. With the colors that are his, those that distinguish him. A certain blue, a certain yellow ocher. Cubist/Futurist, it combines symbols, objects and animals from medieval bestiaries. And stars, highways, planes. A computer. A fan. And the face of the sphinx. He explains to me, while I spend the odd time there, that in the center there are “earthly things” and below a hint of life in the sea, above the stars, the roads of the sky. That present and past intersect there.
“Here you are. This is who I am.”
What’s his name, I tell him back.
“Images of life in composition”.
I smile. “Even here there is a composition”.
The work that has given him the greatest satisfaction in painting competitions is “Polo Players”. He likes it to be figures in a convulsive sum. The muscles of the horses, the arms of the players. But there is, at all, no movement. There is, if anything, fluidity and linearity, softness. An impetus that reassures. Because who watches a polo match doesn’t watch a cavalry assault in battle: he watches an entertaining show on a lawn. Other polo players in history, those of Renato Birolli from the Corrente movement, almost at rest. And also Gen Paul, those so convulsive and engulfing, devourers of air and space.
It occurs to me, looking at Polo Players, that in Anastasia there is almost a childish desire to let go of the reins, after almost a lifetime of producing aeronautical charts and being a graphic designer. To paint for a living.
In any case, there is always creativity in a job like this, he tells me by showing me something and the works I observe are valuable. All by hand, when advertising graphics were done this way. By craftsmen, with tempera and airbrush. The brochures, the decorations, even the stamps were drawn by hand, like those three for the Alitalia Twenty-five Year competition that he takes out of a folder.
“Do you want to be famous?” I throw them there, for fun.
“It’s not my primary desire to get rich painting, if that’s what you mean.” He smiles cleverly. “Selling a painting is sometimes something that saddens me, it’s as if a part of me is leaving”. 90% are all my children. Wouldn’t you sell off one of your works, I ask him in the affirmative. She shakes her head. Then he gets serious. “That’s not why I paint and this crazy market doesn’t interest me. I paint because I have a vital need”. He says in a low voice that ideas come to him suddenly, from the thought of some events or from dreams that he runs to jot down even at night. It occurs to me that some directors do this. We say all this to ourselves as we leaf through the many catalogs and magazines that host it and rummage through the posters. The International Biennial of Rome in 2012, Turin, Cologne, Miami with Art River and, just in these days,
In fact I find myself with an artist with a multifaceted impulse who, as an artist should, is constantly looking for new technical experiments. I am amazed by the difference in style and technique between the works on glass compared to the others. There is something cloudy, gloomy, mysterious about these patches of dense colour. What it seems is that they are impressions of color left there to settle. Something that found a place on that glass and slowly dehydrated. There is opacity, depth and fear. What I see live are works of minute dimensions, at most 40×50. I’m used to not being surprised if an artist diversifies his production considerably. In all there is a duality.
“We all have something more secret,” he tells me. “Something less lively than Polo Players”. Life is full of positive and negative events, telling them all is a duty.
I nod.
Eleonora Dusi, art curator (pseudonym: Pincherle) – Rome