Critical Texts

The apartment is in a historic residential complex of the kind typical of Rome’s Prati district, with its well-kept inner courtyard, the plants and the bicycles with baskets. In that apartment there is an artist’s studio. So, to recap: a house among houses, lunchtime, the offices of accountants, lawyers and notaries, some dentist’s surgery — and a painter. He opens the door smiling and immediately sits me down in his studio, in that contained, discreet corner where he keeps his easel and colours. A studio with all the trimmings: jars of brushes, tubes of paint and the stained palette. The smell of oil and turpentine from the canvas in progress.

Antonio Anastasia intrigues me because he began painting as a boy, in the early 1960s, and by 1968 was already showing some forty works in his first solo exhibition in Maglie at the “Friends Club” cultural circle; afterwards, through circumstances beyond his control, he devoted himself mainly to graphic design — almost exclusively for Alitalia, where he headed the ICARUS project for automated cartography, helping to bring European prestige to our flag carrier. I stop him and say: this is your most important work — pointing to one! And he says yes, but the work he cares about most, even if not the most important, and perhaps the one never exhibited and least on view, is “L’amore perduto” (Lost Love, for my wife), a yellow sphere among the colours. As are dedicated to his wife that happy abstract, “Pensiero d’Amore”, “Primavera a Pallottini” and “Composizione musicale con fiori tropicali”. A painful memory, which was nevertheless the push to take refuge in painting with all his soul — his true profession — and to resume with vigour the search for a new pictorial technique begun in the 1970s. His very personal “Abstract Expressionism”, a mix of Abstract, Informel, Dripping and Spatialism. He often seeks to express all his unease toward a sick society, but told solely and exclusively through colour, without images, in complete freedom. He arrived at this only after many years of research and destroyed canvases, and an intuition that proved a winner after a sleepless night and countless trials.

He tells me that while executing an Abstract work (which he produces only in his country house because of the space) he withdraws, isolates himself, no contact. In his studio crammed with enamels and canvases, in the morning silence, he paints: there is only him, plenty of room to move around, the synthetic enamels and the surface on which to give life to a thought, an idea, through the movement and amalgam of colours guided by the spatula and his fingers, which give rise to those admired, extraordinary chromatic effects, impossible to achieve with a brush.

There is great order in his Roman studio, as in the whole “gallery-home”. His works are everywhere, hung and stacked in every room, including those painted directly on glass, which represent the beginning of his abstract research and certainly characterise him — and, above all, those he likes to call “Cubist/Futurist”: canvases geometrically subdivided in which no, there is no real Cubism. The form is not “opened out” onto the plane but rather segmented into zones of different colour, with a fascinating, full, compact use of primary colours. Every space is filled. It all sounds pleasant as I finally see his Cubist/Futurist works in person.

“Why do you call the still lifes ‘Composizione di natura morta’ or ‘Composizione musicale con fiori tropicali’, ‘Composizione con edera’? Why this word ‘composition’?” I ask him.

“Because the objects are placed in a feigned space; I decide the scene like a director and then portray it. I am the one who brings together musical instruments and flowers. Otherwise this pairing would not exist in nature.” The word “with” is used when there is a living element in the composition. The linearity of this logic is disarming. As are some old paintings from his youth: brutally simple, vaguely elementary, but enthusiastic, happy. Sunsets, the kind poets write about.

“Yes, but,” I go on, putting off his kind invitation to lunch together, “which are the works that truly represent you? Which ones could you say of: ‘this is me’?”

These, he says, pointing toward a large panel in the corridor. It is a wide panel, about three metres high and one hundred and twenty centimetres wide, in his own colours, the ones that distinguish him: a certain blue, a certain ochre yellow, greens, reds, oranges. Cubist/Futurist, it agglomerates symbols, objects and animals from a medieval bestiary. And stars, planets, a computer, a still-life composition, a window open on a hilly sunset, mechanical gear wheels representing work, tubes of paint, and the face of the sphinx. He explains patiently while I wander about, bewildered. In essence the panel represents the sky at the top, earthly things in the middle, a hint of life in the sea at the bottom — where present and past intersect.

“That’s it. This is what I am.” What is it called? I ask in return. “Immagini di vita in composizione” (Images of Life in Composition). I smile. “Here too there is a composition.”

The most representative work, which has given him great satisfaction in painting competitions, is “Giocatori di Polo” (Polo Players). He likes that these are figures in a convulsive sum: the horses’ muscles, the players’ arms. Yet there is no movement at all. There is, if anything, fluidity and linearity, softness. An impetus that soothes. Because whoever watches a polo match is not watching a cavalry charge in battle: they are watching an enjoyable spectacle on a lawn. Other polo players in history — those of Renato Birolli of the Corrente movement, almost at rest; and also Gen Paul’s, truly convulsive and engulfing, devourers of air and space. Looking at Polo Players, it occurs to me that in Anastasia there is almost a childlike desire to slip the reins, after nearly a lifetime producing aeronautical charts and working as a graphic designer — painting for a living. Creativity is always there, in a job like that, he tells me, showing me something, and the works I look at are fine. All by hand, prepared for print with the graphos, when advertising graphics were made this way. By craftsmen, with tempera and airbrush. Brochures, decorations, even postage stamps were drawn by hand, like those three for Alitalia’s twenty-fifth-anniversary competition that he pulls out of a folder.

“Do you want to become famous?” I throw at him, half joking. “Getting rich by painting is not my primary desire, if that’s what you mean.” He smiles shrewdly. “Selling a painting is sometimes something that saddens me; it is as if a part of me goes away.” Many works I consider my children, which I will never give away. You wouldn’t sell off one of your works, I ask, affirmatively. He shakes his head. Then he turns serious and says: “I paint because I have a vital need to.” He tells me in a low voice that ideas often come to him suddenly, from thinking about certain events or from dreams that he hurries to jot down even at night. It occurs to me that some film directors do the same. We say all this as we leaf through the many catalogues and magazines that feature him and rummage among the posters: the Rome International Biennale of 2012, Turin, Cologne, Miami with Art River and, just these days, the Palermo Biennale.

In fact I find myself with an artist of many-sided impulse who, as befits an artist, is in constant search of new technical experiments. I am struck by the difference in style and technique between the works on glass and the others. There is something mysterious in these patches of dense, transparent colour. It seems they are impressions of colour left there to settle — something that found a place on that glass and slowly dehydrated. There is opacity, depth and mystery. Those I see in person are small works, at most 40×50. I am used to not being surprised when an artist diversifies his output considerably. In everyone there is a duality.

“We all have something more secret,” he tells me. “Something less lively than the Polo Players.” I nod.

Gastone Indoni: Hello Antonio, we have been friends for a long time and I know your art, which I have explored in all the styles you have been able, like few others, to present; today, as a friend and not as a critic, I want to ask you the questions that simple complicity suggests to me: tell me how and why you were born and became an artist.

Antonio Anastasia: Well, you know, from a boy I was on first-name terms with colours. Always — in the workshop of my father, a craftsman, painter and decorator, I was enchanted watching him, and I admired how he obtained the colours he needed, the skill with which he mixed synthetic enamels or prepared the tempera to hand out to his workers for the various jobs. I won't hide from you that often, sure of my father's prolonged absence, an unnoticed guest, I would sneak in to try my first dosages, which then — entirely unaware at the time — would become over the years the main target of my inexhaustible research. You know, in 1955 the various shades were obtained by hand, calibrating the main colours into white, and that initial mixing was wonderful; turning the brush inside the container, before the final blend there formed a vortex of colours made first of regular streaks, then of wider meshes, until it took on the desired tone with only a few further small corrections. That chromatic vortex entered my bloodstream at once and never left me.

Gastone Indoni: Such a visceral effect, really?

Antonio Anastasia: I have lived, and still live today, analysing and combining all the infinite harmonic hues of colour and all the shades that enhance chiaroscuro, shadows and volumes. In summer, during school holidays, I went along with the expert workers and learned the “trade”: fake marbles, fake wallpapers which, as I recall, were obtained with rubber rollers and then retouched by hand, thin lines of colour to create fake frames in churches or stately palaces, and so on. All that experience, accumulated up to the age of 18, contributed to my artistic maturity and shaped my intuition for the Abstract works. An irrepressible will for new and multiple chromatic researches derived and was born from that very memory, later refined over the following decades.

Gastone Indoni: Early experiences with your father, training with the workers and of course study; but who influenced and perhaps personalised your painting?

Antonio Anastasia: Despite my four years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome drawing nudes (1965/1969) under the masters Guttuso, Gentilini and Maccari, I was never attracted to the figurative; it is not my genre — just a few landscapes and sunsets because they are full of colour; but I did not feel fulfilled, I did not feel entirely free or creative. I did admire Guttuso's bold lines and lively colours, but I preferred some works by Gentilini, which I felt closer to my decorative and creative sketches made at the Art Institute of Lecce (1963/1965). Decorative and compositional imagination has always prevailed in me, so I was drawn to the Cubist and Futurist works of great masters such as Picasso, Severini, Braque, Boccioni, Tato, Balla and others. I naturally embraced that artistic current accordingly, adapting it to my taste and personality, while admiring the expressive force of Van Gogh's brushstrokes and of many illustrious Macchiaioli and Impressionists.

Gastone Indoni: So you did not undergo any particular captivating spell, or adopt some suggested timbre?

Antonio Anastasia: Obviously I acquired an imposing miscellany of suggestions and connotations which, however, I had to personalise, relentlessly pursuing that instinctive signature you speak of, which would make me feel the sole master of a stylistic hallmark. Unfortunately, after my first solo show in 1968 in my native town with 39 works, barely twenty years old, I moved to Rome to finish my studies at the Academy. Interesting prospects opened up at once and I worked with unspeakable enthusiasm. After a while — you know how life can surprise you — being unable to refuse a decisive assignment, I was forced to skip important national and international art events, which delayed my market placement, achieved later on. I began to be present and to take part assiduously in various national and international exhibitions, finding with satisfaction considerable appreciation from critics unknown to me. In essence I lost my best years and could not cultivate artistic friendships, being also rather reserved, which I believe certainly harmed me in a field that is already so difficult.

Gastone Indoni: That is why you assimilated a vehement chameleon-like force that allowed you to re-propose anyone's styles, as Vittorio Sgarbi himself acknowledged, analysing and marvelling at your perfect Cubism.

Antonio Anastasia: Certainly. That learning from so many great masters and the great desire to emulate them, always keeping my own personality in mind, gradually showed me the road I then took, deciding with conviction what my final path would be.

Gastone Indoni: What happened, how and when?

Antonio Anastasia: In 1970, while continuing to paint PostCubist works, as the very recent ones of 2020 show, I felt a strong need to experiment with techniques to give vent to my most intimate creativity; I wanted to transfer onto the canvas, with immediacy and illustrative synthesis, my many thoughts, or an emotion, natural events that had occurred, those calling for social attention, and why not dreams, so as to glide into surrealism too; and then the cosmos, genre fantasy, perhaps with the use of colour alone, themes free of and far from defined forms, with the help of my hands alone and without brushes.

Gastone Indoni: A period of full creative fury, the classic unconscious reference typical of natural, feverish creators who land on shores they quickly abandon for…

Antonio Anastasia: So I began by trying my hand at tempera on glass, then gradually moved on canvas and wood to the synthetic enamels of my father's memory, and this helped me carry on with the breathless search. The effects began to be satisfying, but only with time and constant endless research did I find the “stroke of genius” to make the synthetic enamels — very difficult to handle — blend together absolutely. At the creative act of these works I withdraw completely from the world around me and, in the silence of my country house, as I begin laying down the enamels, there is always a moment when imagination takes over, the hand runs fast so the colour does not dry, until I find the most unexplored chromatic alchemies.

Gastone Indoni: The classic cathartic moment strikes, which you have brushed against all your life and whose centre you have finally found.

Antonio Anastasia: The result translates into incredible, fantastic images, imaginative and surreal forms, often true flashes of light that project a fascinating and mysterious Universe. A deeply satisfying joy! It often happens that the blend does not satisfy me, and then I do not think twice: I wipe it out and try again later. The observer, once the work is finished, finds himself before such an explosion of colours that it arouses curiosity and absorbs him to the point that he can himself imagine and glimpse forms, as happens in the sky with clouds. But the title of the work often acts as a guiding suggestion.

Gastone Indoni: So, your bond with your works? Regrets, second thoughts, jealousies?

Antonio Anastasia: To be honest I am jealous of most of my works; I have never sold one off, perhaps because I fortunately never had the need; they are like my children and I part with them unhappily. I tend each work with infinite love and, before signing it, I look at it and observe it for days, patiently searching for the missing detail, perhaps excessively. To many it will seem strange, but almost all of them represent me despite their diversity — both the PostCubist works, more reasoned and refined, which I let settle for months on the easel, and the Abstract ones, in which I put my soul and instinct, my feeling, and free all my creativity and passion for colour. I am pleased when a visitor at an exhibition approaches, curious and struck by the colours, one of my abstract works and asks its meaning: then, reading the title and hearing what I wanted to represent, he understands and happily approves of the theme. For me that is already no small success: it means that, though abstract, it has been positively understood.

Gastone Indoni: How do you face the difficulties of the artist today?

Antonio Anastasia: We have lived in difficult times for quite a few years now; the market is flooded with artists of every kind; some are very good professionals, very many are parvenus who do not fit the proper cliché of the artist at all and, while they fatten the pockets of many gallerists and organisers of worthless shows, they disturb market information, which suffers from being distorted by ridiculous offers. Not to mention Institutions that, simply because they are politicised, do not follow a meritorious selection, increasingly deceiving the public without creating a truthful and useful artistic discontinuity. Everything is business, conceived and organised for the God of money. At many contemporary art events and exhibitions I notice works and/or installations that in my opinion have little or nothing artistic about them, yet are admirably reviewed by a servile criticism. I hope that one day the Institutions, perhaps run by people who understand art, will invest decisively in culture and art instead of squandering billions on shameful clientelist theorems.

Gastone Indoni: A “J'accuse” that Zola would applaud…

Antonio Anastasia: In this regard, before concluding, allow me to acknowledge in you a sort of rare exception which perhaps, as you say, does not come to you through merit but through the passion you have always poured into your work; I think your path — your artistic background, which saw you direct, as a painter, an important workshop serving major clients, live artists' experiences first-hand, manage a myriad of exhibitions as curator and gallerist, and act as a publisher attentive to quality and respectful of deserving masters and emerging artists — has enriched you with an experience that, together with your character, instilled in you an approach quite different from the common one, which, as far as I am concerned, has been exemplary.

Gastone Indoni: I stop you, Maestro: do you think the esteem and friendship that unite us should be an integral part of this interview?

Antonio Anastasia: Of course! Ours has been a friendly conversation, hasn't it? Then, if you have been writing critiques and reviews for me all your life, when I give you a deserved acknowledgement — confirmed also by the success of your work as a blogger, not to mention your splendid magazine — it can hardly be taken as partial flattery. In fact, you know what I say? Let's toast this meeting; let's go and have some spaghetti, Gastò!