Mo – Fr 9:00-13:00 / 14:00-18:00. Saturday by appointment
From the 1940s onwards, in Europe, under a large historiographic label, the so-called “Informal Season”, many artists began to work: from Fautrier to Hartung, Masson to Dubuffet, Burri to Wols, Mathieu to Stael. Many of them have entered for a long time the prestigious Pantheon of the history of art; many others have been almost completely forgotten, and are known only by a sophisticated elite of enthusiasts and acquaintances. Among these stands the name of Alfredo Chighine (Milan, 1914 – Pisa, 1974).
Beyond all ideologies, apart from any conceptual scheme, Alfredo Chighine’s art is composition and landscape, harmony and clay, vision and transfiguration. On one hand, his painting never wants to transcend the reality: a landscape, a plain, a mountain, a field, a figure, a sky, a river, a boat, the sea. On the other hand, he alters this concrete naturalistic figure. Chighine’s oils have exquisite, soft, visionary patterns; rich inlays of crystallized modules arrange his paintings. Up to the last fifties, Chighine is an almost tonal painter: a single colour is dominating his wide landscapes: now grey, now blue, now green, now brown. He tightens and compacts the tints as a rhythmical grip, sometimes patterned by acute and vibrant markings. Since the late 1950s, his palette has become more vivid, bold and chromatic. In some beautiful paintings of the 1960s (on display): Composizione di barche, Blu e nero, Piccola composizione, we touch the vertices of his painting. The spatula becomes more energetic, thick, resolved; the gesture broad, vigorous and solar; the rhythm of the connections becomes robust, glorious, solemn; like a musical progression, the overall tone explodes in a chromatic and harmonic composition.