Painted in 1957, ’58 and ’59, the three works by Gastone Novelli acquired by the CRT Foundation respond to needs not very unlike those that would animate the period of Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism, where artists seem to embark on a search for painting’s ground zero. But in Novelli’s work this search, which others carry out within the closed perimeters of form or in the gestural expression of silent, pre-linguistic feeling, becomes a path toward the sign-related and mythic genesis of thought, action, and painting itself.
The work of other artists and the theories of critics from other countries had led to a formulization of poetics that spoke of flatness, of two-dimensionality, necessary for any painting that wanted to be authentic. [...]
