Neon nel cemento, 1967 - 1969

Although his early artistic investigations emerged within the pictorial discipline, Anselmo immediately sought to reject a nostalgic approach to creating a painting, which he saw as a space apart, separate from the artist’s sensibility. As Jean-Christophe Amman relates, Anselmo said: “It is true that the painting has its fascination, but it excludes you, you remain alone with your emotions.” There is a well-known story of how the artist, walking one day at dawn at the summit of Stromboli, had a clear perception of the infinite realm of which, from that point on, all his works would become components. Unlike what occurs outside the closed imaginative plane of the canvas, the fulcra of energy created through his installations include everything within themselves: artist, viewer, cosmic geometries. No element remains isolated in the solitude of its finite reality. Everything is reorganized in relation to the positioning of the work’s elements, and the work responds to the trajectories and lines of energetic tension of earth and sky. [...]