Anthony Anastasia. He lives and works in Rome. Son of art, he has been in contact with chromatic materials since he was a child, thus acquiring that rare familiarity with color management that will motivate his brilliant pictorial production, accompanying him throughout his life. Naturally inclined towards the artistic direction, he elects this type of study as his own existential path and in 1965 he obtains the diploma of Master of Artat the Lecce State Institute of Art. Four years later he obtained the first degree diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome after a brilliant four-year attendance which allowed him to learn from the teachings of the great masters Franco Gentilini, Renato Guttuso, Mino Maccari, Piero Guccione. In the meantime, he collaborated until 1973 with the G. Benvignati studio in Rome which took care of the interior design and the advertising brand of Alitalia agencies all over the world. The collaboration also extended to the 7o Sigla studio where logos and advertising plans were created for companies . In 1974 Alitalia hired him as a graphic designer in the section. Cartography with the task of dealing with the design and production of air navigation charts, as well as the creation of brochures for the world travels of the Pope and Presidents of the Italian Republic. These tasks will last until 1990 when he becomes responsible for the Icarus Group, the new information system for the production of Computerized Cartography. Along this professional path he will never neglect his artistic activity, which will rather intensify much after 2009, when family events will lead him to communicate in a more intimate and close way with painting. Attracted by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, he has always expressed a predilection for a form of abstract art (started in 1971) suspended between Cubist geometries and expressionist autonomy, pushing color to a level of total communication, convinced that only its expressiveness can help solve problems affecting art and its decadent way of placing itself in contemporary society. He experiments with the most varied and complex techniques and color mixtures, introducing into the pictorial composition also many synthetic glazes, difficult to use not only with the brush but also with the spatula, representing one of his most demanding challenges. Entering his atelier one feels enveloped by the powerful energy released by his palette… The great value of painting without figures is undoubtedly that of being totally free and free from the constraint of submitting to compositional rules. Awarded by well-known critics such as V. Sgarbi and others, gallery owners, he participates in numerous national and international artistic events, always receiving great acclaim. Among the numerous and qualified bibliographic references in art magazines and catalogues, we mention the Catalog of Modern Art No. 54 of the Giorgio Mondadori Editorial.

The disposition of the sign praises the iconological treatise preferred by the tonal liveliness. The iconographic arrangement enhances the pictorial structure created by the artist Antonio Anastasia, who, in the movement conditioned by the reaction of the elements, also considers the objective priorities of the revisions in circular layers typical of his paintings.

With this indicative response, Antonio Anastasia’s painting is unique and deserving in its concretist definition which exalts the forces capable of interacting with the multitudes and chromatic sequences, solid and which contrast the space, for attitudes measured in distances and brought closer with subjects arranged in the emblematic vision of reality, in a world made of harmonic form, revisited in the effective context of the dynamic spatial configuration, conceived by the artist as a creative investigation towards the solid and its consistency by virtue of descriptive procedures that fill its wonderful historical treatise and adorn the naturalistic surroundings with spectacular light effects that interact beautifully with the organic vision”. Conferment of the title “Academic of Honor for Life”.

 Cav. Flavio de Gregorio

Art historian and critic

A pictorial identity that is recognized at first glance thanks to an unmistakable and multiform style that is created and manifested with choreographies dictated according to the subject and the moment of release and laying of the colour; sometimes manifested with geometric evolutions that refer to typically futurist traits; others expressed by naturalistic references with a veristic imprint, still others of minimal or even naive citation.

A narrative kaleidoscope with a surprising variety of compositions and the consequent luminescent alternations from the interlayering of reverberations, flashes and refractions that say it all about the technical preparation and descriptive expertise displayed with such great competence.

He manages to conjugate absolutely unusual verbs to illustrate his stories which, at times, as if they were impetuous waterfalls, multiply in jets, effluvia, rivulets and rivulets with a normal genre cadence with a figurative imprint; or they unfold in a sort of informal magma which, by liquefying, assorts the colors fabled unusual, rare combinations, but always ordered by a direction of intriguing and daring elegance. It is then possible to merge reports deduced from an intimacy of close human nature and depositions of gaseous and gaseous nebulae stolen from veiled boreal atmospheres which it seems impossible to belong to the same creative hands, to the same thinking nucleus or fulcrum. The common thread of his excursusit is always a great passion that is badly repressed and so manifests that it knows how to amalgamate the tenderness of brushstrokes like glazes, with the more violent release of material assembled by a mixed technique with a rough, asynchronous and opalescent rendering.

All tacit invitations to peer inside the deepest darkness of one’s intimacy with the introspective doing of the artist who expresses in his works, aided by a delicate never exaggerated symbolism, the desire to observe, meditate, elaborate to declare to the world the outcome of this intimate analytic process.

Antonio Anastasia appears as the son of an experienced situationist of the cinema of the nouvelle vague, the tormented introspection of Francesca Woodman and the dangerous eroticism of Milan Kundera: he likes to steal views, scenarios and mental panoramas to convey to the viewer of his work the most unusual and three-dimensional aspect of thought which is typical of man, even the most common. His universal feeling makes him so licensed and qualified to express himself, to authorize him to transmit his whips and rigorous sensations in color, but sharing and interacting with others, while attracting attention, makes empathy and arouses and sharpens the perception of being together .Here then is that colorism, when sober and harmonious and when inspired and powerful, is a source of vigorous tonochromatic contrasts and bestows on this eclectic artist that resigned but also calm acceptance of himself and his state,

Gastone Ranieri Indoni 

art critic

The enchantment of reality in the poetry of the imaginary in the paintings of Maestro Antonio Anastasia

The fascinating figurative path of the master Antonio Anastasia is distinguished by a narrative suspended in time, in the magical appearance of figural data inserted in a compositional construct in the basic geometry, through compositions and overlaps, revealing images that acquire volumetric solidity in a complex play of lines which chase each other and intersect in the continuous relationship between lights and shadows, in a dreamy vision of the visible world.

In his splendid paintings the intensity of the colors excels, between glazes and transparencies in the shades of bright reds, golden yellows, luminous blues and the variegated greens of nature which are sublimated by the sign, while he flows quickly and decisively in visions of dreamlike beauty.

Starting from a realist description, the figures, still lifes and landscapes represent decomposed representations, mindful of the Cubist lesson, while an evocative world opens up which, in abandonment to dreams and the unconscious, reveals the enchantment of reality, in which there is a poetic sense. Thus, the spaces are symbolically transfigured, while the objects experience their own secret reality in a metaphysical dimension enveloped in a suffused luminosity with warm chromaticism. So then, the apparent world is not completely excluded, adopting several viewpoints in the graphic design system that give rise to different and overlapping representations with formal analogies in a silent and enchanting scenario. There is, therefore, a surreal participation,

As in the paintings of Picasso and Braque, in the paintings of Antonio Anastasia there is a reference to analytical cubism which also progresses in free abstract formulations, following the paths of the unconscious in its existential home. In this way, the eclectic personality of the master Antonio Anastasia is manifested in his constant search for form and colour, which evolves from the Cubist matrix in his dreamy visions to dissolve matter and form in chromatic fluidity, between psychic improvisations, while the emotionality of the color translates the author’s subtle changes of mind. That’s why, the mobile and fantastic element in the emotional charge, shines through in the abstract expression of Antonio Anastasia, where a new dimension combines the real with the imaginary, the enigma with poetry, the rationality and feeling of things. Everything harmonizes in the color that fantastically recreates unprecedented harmonies in the variety of inspirational ferments, where the darting play of chromaticism with brilliant shades, concretizes an abstract reality, between existential allusions and symbols, following a utopian journey of thought beyond the confines of reality in poetics of the imaginary, while an essentiality of a Kandynskian art stands out, in which there is the exaltation of the lyrical and musical rhythm of free geometric shapes that dissolve in fluidity and transparency in pure lyrical feelings.

The rapid and spontaneous brushstrokes translate dynamic representations into chromatic harmony in the swirling swirl of colors that appear as if they were cosmic landscapes, amidst the glow of the infinite night.

There is, therefore, an eclecticism of pictorial language, from Kandynsky of the Parisian period towards a futurist orientation in the visual dynamism of the images to arrive at an interpreted symbolic-expressionist expression, through today’s futuristic culture always oriented towards new expressive forms for a new art concept. Herein lies the charm in the paintings of the master Antonio Anastasia: the free and informal plots that chase each other in the coloristic fabric transfuse a cosmic energy into a visionary transfiguration of the visible world, where the futurist matrix is ​​evident in the dynamism of the abstract gestures, among the lithic suggestions that praise the freedom of expression and the charm of a new dream.

In the end, tradition merges with the avant-garde in the continuous search to combine diversified experiences of the historical past to overcome academic dictates, through the emotion of shapes and colors that recreate his fervent imagination in an ideal logos in the perennial flow of things .

BETWEEN DREAM AND REALITY THE LYRIC HARMONY OF COLOR

The charm of the oneiric runs through the evocative figurative narration of the master Antonio Anastasia, through expressive data that harmoniously combine conceptual analysis with the poetry of the subjects transfigured by inner echoes, between intense and brilliant tones in clear atmospheres, where the figural data belong to a secret reality, in which magical poetry hovers.

Here then, Antonio Anastasia leads us towards an evocative world between suggestions, defining the images that emerge in the memory, through graphics and an imaginative setting with cubist accentuations that arrive at silent and metaphysical spaces.

The research therefore opens up to a figurative dimension that refers to a very fine symbolic reading, where the visible world transfigured in the author’s psychological home becomes an expression of soul vibrations. In this way, his pictorial language that goes beyond the academic dictates, also evokes the artistic transition, from Cézanne to Picasso , while a graphic process of light-form is carried out in analytical cubism in the representation of natural images.

That’s why, the line is born primary in the design, harmonizing in the refined chromaticism that rests with skilful mastery on the depicted data, softly modulating on the limits of things, and bringing back in the illusory three-dimensionality with the chiaroscuro effects, an enveloping luminosity in the decomposed paintings, where the dreamlike geometric shapes blur the images in the dreamy and poetic apparition in the feeling.

The color thus becomes the protagonist in the tonal unity, while the complex pictorial texture determines facets of intense colors, among the flaming reds, the variegated greens of nature, the bright blues and sunny yellows, which flow with a mysterious inner breath , where the compositional construct gradually progresses in visions between free abstract formulations.

In the airy landscapes and still lifes, the rhythm is delimited in modular and detachable areas, even the vanishing perspective fits into a rhythm, where everything harmonizes in a scenario that tends to geometrize and mark reality according to a new and fantastic order .

And indeed, the enchantment with the Cubist evocation expresses in Antonio Anastasia’s works of art in a spontaneous and almost more tactile way, the unlimited space of his memory, the abandonment to the illogical, the improbable of our existence in a other dimension.

In his visions, therefore, the charge of Cubist energy reveals a passage between the real and the fantastic, that mélange between external image and internal echoes, between symbol and apparent world.

How not to ideally follow these fantastic ideas? Metaphors, but I would like to say moral apologists follow his poetics of the imaginary.

His tension towards spirituality, towards poetry and dreams, is captivating. Antonio Anastasia admirably manages to combine his dreamlike escape with a sort of extreme intellectual lucidity.

The images become memory, but not completely unreal, full of energy implied in a form that combines the symbolic and emotional elements together, in a conceptual path that is colored by a fantastic palette.

In the end, everything harmonizes in the light, where the high color and graphic synthesis progresses in a free pictorial gesture that sublimates the art in the chromaticism, while it dissolves in the luminosity in landscapes of the soul. But above all, what is striking is a painting that becomes poetry: the horizon broadens in paintings of memory, while imaginary forms are pursued that enchant with an allusive sense, where cosmic landscapes open up to infinity to overcome the realistic tangibility of things in afflatus with the natural harmonies of the universe.

Carla d’Aquino Mineo , Art Critic and events curator – Padua

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

Italian painter Antonio Anastasia works with a variety of technologies and different stylistic devices. So he used in his abstract paintings colors with strong luminosity and interesting surface effect. In the work “Solar Explosion” the artist sets orange and yellow on a blue/black background which allows them to penetrate there like tongues of fire. The distant earth, which remains intact from the explosion, the sun with its fascinating, powerful play of incandescent colors and the strong momentum create a dynamic representation of exceptional visual effect that involves the user making him a participant in the event.

In “Pensiero d’amore” Anastasia uses the same technique as when investing in different fields of color on a light blue and green spotted background worked with a spatula, she inserts a few white threads as if to symbolize flowers. Eccentric ovals in yellow-gold lines mark the bottom half of the work as a pair.

The red that emanates from this nucleus signifies the passion for the beloved. They are, as the title suggests, another place of sincere thoughts of love that manifest themselves with an impressive lightness, delicacy and interpretative chromaticity.

Anastasia also developed on the basis of Cubism, a method that resolves image excerpts from their context and concentrate, or play in a different color scheme. The background landscape in “Polo Players” is proof of this. Instead, the action squeezes into the foreground as in a conglomerate color and shape, where the riders are conceived with their polo mallets in violent movements. Here, technology is refined alienation within the masterfully executed figurative painting as evidence of his remarkable painterly skills fully supporting and generating boldness and excitement.

Ingrid Gardill – Art Historian

Retrieved from Volume   Internationale Kunst Heute 2014 , Germany

On the occasion of the VI Edition of the Lupa Prize – Rome, Palazzo Pontificio Maffei Marescotti. 5 – 12 March 2013

The art and culture event “Premio della Lupa” is once again an unmissable figure in the schedule of La Rosa dei Venti events. Each edition features twists, novelties and prestigious awards for the selected artists. This sixth edition saw the participation, for the first time, of the artist Antonio Anastasia who finished in the top three.

Each work by Anastasia carries with it the traces of a passage through places, passions, universes that lead to the narration of a dimension suspended between reality and the imaginary.

His intense artistic work is admirable, knowing how to grasp and combine, in lines and colours, sometimes poetic and symbolic messages, sometimes rich in an expressiveness that delves into the soul.

The singularity of Anastasia’s subjects is clearly evident in her latest production where the characters represented hover over the magma of a decomposed material, sometimes conceived for a plurality of colors which in agreement with each other lead to a concreteness of the image. Her identity is thus reconstructed for successive modifications of lines and new formal-spatial conclusions of the composition, emblematic in this regard is the work “Forme nel Spazio” and the cycle of paintings of Cubist and Futurist inspiration.

Elements that give framework to the images, not random or extemporaneous, but parts of a conscious addition.

Each of these canvases depicts an internal and overall balance of signs and shapes, evidence of an evident and sensitive mediation between order and disorder. The paintings then arise from the complexity of a project-process based on rules and irregularities.

Triangulations in space, convex shapes, lines, geometric solutions all expressed with an irrepressible riot of colors reflecting a sunny and positive soul, consequence and outcome of the belief that art can have that thaumaturgical and miraculous effect aimed at soothing pains and sorrows of the present century.

Simone G. Pieralice – Curator and Art Critic –  Rome

The creative action of painting is not limited but linked to the objective act of execution as each individual action brings experience with it and this is nothing more than the result, even if unconscious, of a great knowledge and a memory . Deep and heartfelt reflections lead Maestro Antonio Anastasia to an enhancement of color, precisely with regard to the latter, he places it in its etymological essentiality of elusive ability to cover, protect and safeguard the secret soul of the surface and at the same time reveal , of surfacing, of explosive appearance of the image.

There is in the works the valorisation of the processes, linked to life, in the continuous research, not without accents of refined irony as in the work “Polo players”, a renewed balance between the impulses of the becoming of existence, of its passions and its creative vivacity that makes its way into an increasingly differentiated attention to the multifaceted experiences of painting.

Awareness in painting manifests pure sensitivity by grafting ever new balances that keep the viewer’s attention alive, concentrating it both on the whole image and on the different forms that compose it. A dynamic pictorial universe offered to the user who does not give up exercising his function of verification and control.

Raffaele de Salvatore – Director and Critic of EuroArte – Lecce – April 2013

Abstract, informal or conceptual? In which stylistic fields does the research that Antonio Anastasia is conducting with a sure hand take place? Judging by this flaming glow of distant worlds, projected onto the bright blue of infinity, it can be said that the work “The Orion Nebula” is a conceptual expression which in the explosion of its reds constitutes the metaphor of a world the whose remoteness allows one to hope without fear of contradiction that it is a matter of a better universe than the one in which we live.

A world described with wisdom of means, focusing attention on the contrast between the nearby fire and the stars which, as in medieval frescoes, form a serene and beatific background. Anastasia has therefore quite appropriately exploited the possibilities that her abstract allows to extend her artistic intentions over an endless panorama.

Aldo Maria Pero – Critic

Euroarte, April 2013

I had the opportunity to view his site and I was very impressed by his works, especially those defined as “Cubist-Futurist”; in them I recognized that sublime harmony that animated the still lifes of “purism”, especially those of Le Corbusier .

In my opinion, with these works you fit perfectly into this purely purist sphere, even if with other paintings you demonstrate that you know how to master different styles and subjects.

 Daniele Radini Tedeschi – Historian and Art Critic