Giovanni Alicò

(Catania, 1906 - Milano, 1971)

Giovanni Alicò was born in Catania in 1906. A self-taught painter, his approach to art was free from constraints or preconceived boundaries. In 1935, he settled first in Naples and then in Milan. In 1942, he exhibited with a work at the 23rd Venice Biennale, and that same year, he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Tornabuoni in Florence. Between 1948 and 1953, he spent six years active in Argentina, with three solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires and numerous group exhibitions at various national salons in the cities of La Rioja, Santa Fé, Mendoza, and Rosario. After returning to Italy, from the mid-1950s and throughout the following decade, he held several solo exhibitions in Catania, Milan, Rome, and Como. He won the Suzzara Prize in 1955 with the work Peasant Resting, in which the painter, freed from cold, realistic depictions and far from the neo-Cubist patterns typical of the post-war period, indulges in a painting style influenced by light, with broad fields of green, gray, and earth tones, supported by a dense pictorial material defined by a thick outline. The painting is currently housed in the Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporanea in Suzzara. In 1957, he exhibited at the Galleria il Pincio in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, one of the most active venues on the art scene, where Renato Guttuso and Carla Accardi also exhibited. He began his artistic career by depicting carts with colorful puppet shows, preferably using flat colors. He later introduced delicate, vibrant colors to his palette, and focused on themes imbued with a marked spirituality. His favorite subjects were female figures, still lifes, and landscapes. In the 1950s, Giovanni Alicò's style moved closer to that of Guttuso, within the framework of social realism. His focus was on synthetic figurative painting, which proceeded through suggestions while generally adhering to the themes of social realism. After 1960, a significant poetics of arabesques, light and color effects, and blurred motions entered his work. From 1967, anthropomorphic figures, ghost-like figures, appeared against these backgrounds, hovering in the compositional space. The artist's later work, however, is characterized by paintings in which signs, repeated geometric shapes, and large splashes of color are rendered with intense and vivid hues, achieving informal and material results. Giovanni Alicò died in Catania in 1971. After his death, a major retrospective was held at the Palazzo della Borsa in Catania in 1973. Many of his works are held in important private collections in Europe and America, as well as in various art foundations.