Artists' portfolio: Alberto Biasi, dynamic visions of art

Alberto Biasi was born in Padua on 2 June 1937 to Giuseppe and Silvia Zappi Recordati. His – explains Isabella Panfido in the artist's biography published on the Master's official website – is a family that has already donated to art a painter, Lavinia Fontana, a well-known name in seventeenth-century painting and a poet, Tirsi Leucasio, initiator with Metastasio of Arcadia.

Soon, during the war years, Alberto lost his mother and was taken in by his paternal grandmother in Carrara San Giorgio, a small town in the Paduan countryside where his grandmother ran a tavern. He grew up in contact with the townspeople, in an extended family atmosphere, until his high school years, when he returned to Padua to attend the Liceo Classico, then he moved to Venice to follow the Institute of Architecture and the Corso Superiore of Industrial Design, where he won a scholarship set up by Paolo Venini. They are years of knowledge and artistic passions, he approaches and deepens fundamental moments of twentieth century art: the Neoplastic movement, Futurism, Dadaism enter and take root in the training path of the young Biasi.

In 1958 he began teaching drawing and art history in public schools and in 69 he was assigned the chair of the arts of advertising graphics (which he would hold uninterruptedly until 1988). Meanwhile, his activity as an artist takes shape: in 59 he receives from the hands of Virgilio Guidi the first prize at the IV Biennial of Art of Cittadella. It is the first public recognition of an artist who, albeit very young, was filtering ferments, political ideals, artistic anxieties: the Enne Group was born, from Padua, with which he will work (but Biasi is the soul and driving force of the historic artistic group) until its definitive dissolution in '67. Biasi's contacts soon spread nationally and internationally: he exhibited in 60 with Manzoni and Castellani and the European artists of the 'New artistic conception. The innovative spirit of those years sees him as the protagonist: in '61 he joined the "New trends" movement, in '62, as Group N, with Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari and Group T, he participated in the foundation of the Arte Programmata movement.

In these early years Biasi articulates his art according to new research canons: the interaction of the spectator with the work becomes an inescapable foundation, the movement, in its passive meaning of virtual motion, apparent effect of movement, leads the artist to address the problems of kineticism and the consequent research on visual perception and the individual reaction to light stimuli. The activity of this period is marked by the "Trame", the first study on the interference of the movement of the gaze and of natural light on a static and stratified surface, of natural inspiration, the result of the observation of complex and primitive elements such as beehives. Alongside the Textures he soon created the "Optical-dynamic Reliefs": superimpositions of lamellar structures played on the effect of contrasting colors and activated by the movement of the spectator who thereby becomes the "actor", co-responsible for the visual event. Then the "Dynamic Forms" begin to appear, obtained through the twisting of materials prepared in thin sheets and arranged according to rigorously calculated geometries applied on different chromatic backgrounds, the "Photoreflections" in real movement and the "Ambienti" with an unstable perception, iridescent atmospheres of moving lights and liquids. Certainly to be mentioned, belonging to this last section of creations are the “Great Dive into the Rainbow”, “Eco”, and the triptych “I am, you are, he is, therefore we are”.

In the works of Alberto Biasi there seems to be an attempt to capture the pulsations of nature. “Indeed it is. For example – explains the artist – I've always been fascinated by fire. I can't say what I feel, but I remain there enchanted to watch him for hours. In front of the rain it's the same thing. When I was a kid, I spent hours watching the drops falling into puddles. They make that bubble that expands and widens. It is from the observation of these natural phenomena that I began to do many of my works, somewhat by chance. I remember that I made my first works with perforated papers that were used for silkworm farms”.

In the meantime, the N Group dissolved and, having abandoned the choral tonality, embraced it to adhere to a strong political and ideological commitment (at the time of the activity of the 'N' group, Biasi defined himself as an artistic operator, meaning by this a result of social implication ), Biasi's artistic activity continues in "solo" developing those themes that will remain a 'happy obsession' to this day. His civil commitment, however, will remain present over the years, with participation and sharing in city life, until he joins the position of President of the Provincial Tourism Board of Padua between the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties when he will give development to cultural and artistic projects concerning Padua, its cultural history and its landscape.

Meanwhile his art finds new phases of study and experimentation. By deepening the research on the luminous impact of natural light, Biasi develops new solutions with the "Politipi", with a certain hypnotic fascination created through twisting, superimposing planes, interweaving of foils and strips, thus interacting, in the pursuit of harmonic movement, with the depth, third dimension more alluded to than actually addressed. The Politypes of the seventies evolve in the following decade acquiring figural intentions: the perceptive effects become more and more complex, attracted by a figural evidence that encloses other three-dimensional sinkings, deceptions or reals of the light intercepted in the layers of superimposed matter. The game between spectator-actor and work becomes more and more articulated and free, the form is enriched with easily recognizable images of which the eye is confidently certain; in them, circumscribed by them, however, new optical 'traps' open up manipulated by the light which varies with the shifting of the point of view: the absolute variable of perception in the spectator is confirmed and attested, which is questioned and provoked in the great anthology at the Museum degli Eremitani of Padua in 1988 responded with an enthusiastic turnout (42000 visitors).

In the XNUMXs the Politipi were enriched by an element that had until now been partially neglected by Alberto Biasi, painting, in the form of insertions of colour, traces, shadows, allusions which support the articulated structure of the stratified surfaces in counterpoint; this is how the "Assemblies" are born, often developed in diptychs and triptychs which develop, in more recent years up to the present day, an increasingly rigorous and coherent coloristic severity, tending towards monochrome. The extreme rigor of the monochrome enhances, in the combination and overlapping of surfaces, assembled together, the 'breaking' point, of crisis in the linear reading, where the planes of color converge in a three-dimensional source, alluding to a generating space of energy. And it is from this space that Biasi's investigation moves into the new, yet underlying in all his production, attention to sculpture. Corten steel, aluminum, methacrylate are the media of Biasi's challenge to three-dimensional space, faced in the large sizes of works also for outdoors: totems, vertically developed slabs, as well as interrupted spirals, helixes of dense metal tubes become transpositions, reinventions, outcomes of the 'happy obsession', of Biasi's constant research in the field of visual perception.

Alberto Biasi (Padua, 1937)

Protagonist of the history of post-war Italian art, his figure is one of the most coherent and authoritative internationally in the field of what in Italy has been defined with various names including: "programmed art", "kinetic art", or “optical art”. From 1959 – the year that marks the debut of the young Biasi's artistic research – to today, his activity has moved constantly under the banner of perceptive investigation, through cycles of works, each of which has poetically and scientifically addressed some problems related to vision: from the first Trame to the very famous Torsioni, from Light Prisms to Optical-dynamics. In 1988 he held an anthology of his at the Eremitani Civic Museum in Padua. In 2000 he elaborated a synthesis of the previous researches and created the Assemblaggi, above all mainly monochromatic diptychs and triptychs, with an impressive plastic and coloristic effect. In 2006 he exhibited in the Hermitage Halls of St. Petersburg. In addition to the twelve exhibitions of the Enne Group, Biasi has set up more than one hundred personal exhibitions in prestigious venues such as the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, the Wigner Institute in Erice, the Museum of the Cathedral of Barcelona, ​​the National Museum of Villa Pisani and the National Gallery of Prague. He has also participated in more than five hundred group exhibitions including Italian Zero & Avantgarde '60s at the MAMM Museum in Moscow, the XXXII and XLII Venice Biennale, the XI San Paolo Biennale, the X, XI and XIV Quadrennial of Rome and the most notes Biennial of graphics, obtaining numerous and important awards. His works are present in important museums and prestigious Italian and international public and private collections.

Market: since the beginning of the 2015s, Alberto Biasi's quotations have recorded a constant rise which reached their peak in 100. Since then, a healthy consolidation has been underway which has stabilized the prices on the medium-high levels of the quotations reached in precedence. According to the Artprice index, 2000 euros invested in a work by Biasi in 535 is currently worth an average of 430 euros with a revaluation of over 700%. Over 65 auctions of various types with a percentage of sold around 2017% and a turnover that - in auctions alone - in 400 came close to XNUMX thousand euros.
Galleries: Maab gallery and Dep Art in Milan; Tornabuoni Art with offices in Florence, Forte dei Marmi, Paris and London; Merry Ravizza of Lugano.
Prices: The various typologies of the Master's historical works dating back to the 60s (textures, twists, optical dynamic and optical kinetic reliefs, visual dynamics, etc.) require an investment that can vary from 30 to 150 thousand euros depending on the techniques and dimensions . The polytypes of the 70s –'