Gastone Novelli (Vienna 1925 – Milan 1968) was one of the leading figures in Italian painting after World War II. Today, on the centenary of his birth, the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna in Venice is dedicating a new, fundamental monographic exhibition to him: an opportunity to rediscover the artistic quality and revolutionary power of his work. The project is part of a series of major exhibitions that Ca’ Pesaro has dedicated over the years to the masters of the post-war period, from Cy Twombly to Arshile Gorky, and Afro to Roberto Matta, among others.

A further reason to celebrate Novelli in Venice, a key location in his artistic career, is the addition to the civic collections of two works donated by his heirs. These two masterpieces mark the extremes of his mature production: Era glaciale (‘Ice Age’), 1958, and Allunga il passo amico mio (‘Quicken your pace, my friend’), 1967.

The exhibition, which unfolds in eight rooms on the second floor of the museum and presents approximately sixty works, focuses on the most intense period of Novelli’s production, from 1957 to 1968. The exhibition opens with the informal works of the second half of the 1950s and continues through to the works of the end of the decade, in which Novelli’s words and actions once again take on a more explicit ethical and political meaning. The only works not appearing in the exhibition are those from his early years in Brazil, which were the subject of a ‘first chapter’ of specific analysis in this year’s exhibition Gastone Novelli. A Arte deve viver ao sol (‘Art must live in the sun’) at the MAC USP in São Paulo, curated by Ana Magalhães and Marco Rinaldi.

The chronological order highlights the succession of different phases of the artist’s interests, showing how, although spanning a very short period of time – just over ten years – these touched on some of the key points of the contemporary artistic debate. Two rooms are dedicated to the works he chose for the Venice Biennale in 1964 and 1968. These invitations to the Biennale represented two fundamental milestones in his career which, as he himself stated, can “give a clear and complete indication of the possibilities of my language”.

The exhibition layout

The 1950s saw a transition from the informal materiality and gestural character of his early works, in which he introduced writing as a visual and narrative sign, to the neo-Dada influences of his later works, in which he also experimented with collage. Era glaciale (‘Ice age’, 1958), the work that is now entering the Venetian collections, belongs to this juncture: “a painting is the apparition of an appearance”, declared the artist, and Era Glaciale is thus the appearance of a magical language, Novelli’s true stylistic signature. His was an art close to poetry in which we find echoes of the most lyrical artists of the twentieth century, Paul Klee and Osvaldo Licini above all.

In the early 1960s, Novelli went beyond Informal art by devising a new form of figuration: the canvas became a space for collecting and cataloguing ancestral signs, words and symbols. His paintings were then filled with writing that was deliberately difficult to decipher, in keeping with the research of the literary neo-avant-garde, such as that which appears in Una delle sale del museo (‘One of the museum rooms’, 1960), with long passages or fragments of sentences, numerical or alphabetical sequences, single symbols or isolated letters, enclosed within squares and boxes, as in Dizzy (1960) and Thelonious (1960), and sometimes in actual grids, such as those visible in Il re del sole (‘King of the sun’, 1961) and Il re delle parole (‘King of words’, 1961). These new spaces took in everything that interested him, from poetry to jazz, from alchemy to linguistics, and from science to depth psychology.

An essential aspect to remember is his travel: after some stays in Greece, mountains became a recurring subject in his paintings and the main inspiration for his sculptural work, as can be seen in the core of works on display today at Ca’ Pesaro, including Sonnenberg and Schönberg, both from 1964.

In 1964, Novelli was invited to make use of a personal room at the 32nd Venice Biennale. It was his first participation in the Venetian exhibition and he chose ten of his latest works: Il grande linguaggio (‘Great language’), Il gioco dell’oca (‘Game of the goose’), Barcelona (omaggio a Germano Lombardi), Mare buono per la pesca (‘A good sea for fishing’), Il vocabolario (‘Vocabulary’), Un orto per Marina (‘A kitchen garden for Marina’), Sole che dirige il viaggio (‘Sun directing the voyage’), Il fare della luna (‘The doings of the moon’), Pianeta che conduce il giorno (‘Plane conducting the day’), Spazio logico (‘Logical space’). These were visionary landscapes, ‘blank pages’, a fairly cohesive group of works, opposed in content, material and colour to the clamour of American Pop Art. One of the rooms in the exhibition is dedicated to these works.

The mid-1960s saw the felicitous return of colour in the exploration of landscapes (Il campo dei giochi (‘The playing field’, 1965)), symbols (L’aquilone del mago (‘The wizard’s kite’, 1965)) and alphabets (La grande “A”, (‘Large “A”’, 1965)), combining linguistic fragments collected by the artist over the years. These archetypal forms were continuously ‘re-stated’ and ‘re-formed’ in a unique and unrepeatable way, intertwined with history and contemporary references, entrusted to the written word, with direct references to politics, as in Per una rivoluzione permanente (per Lev Trotzky) (‘For a permanent revolution (for Leon Trotsky)’) of 1965, and to customs, Attenti al sergente Bond (‘Beware of Sergeant Bond’), also from 1965, dedicated to the release of the film Thunderball, based on Ian Fleming’s character.

1968 marked the year of his death but also of his consecration to eternity, thanks to a symbolic and powerful gesture of protest: in that year he turned the paintings in his personal room at the Venice International Art Exhibition towards the wall and wrote “La Biennale è fascista” (‘The Biennale is fascist’) on the back of one of them. He thus consecrated himself in the collective memory of the art world as being one of the undisputed protagonists of an exceptional season of responsibility and protest.

Before this, Venice was already a part of Novelli: he moved there in 1967, remaining until October 1968. He took a studio in the Casa dei Tre Oci on the Giudecca and forged some close friendships in the city, such as with Vittorio Carrain, owner of the All’Angelo restaurant, for whom he created the work Allunga il passo amico mio (‘Quicken your pace, my friend’, 1967), which is now part of the civic collections of Ca’ Pesaro.

In addition to representing a fundamental step in investigating Gastone Novelli, the exhibition also represents an opportunity to reap the fruits of the most important studies dedicated to the artist, first and foremost the General Catalogue of his paintings and sculptures, published in 2011 by the Archivio Gastone Novelli in collaboration with Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, which in 1999 presented the last major retrospective dedicated to the artist by a public institution, following the one organised in 1988 by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.