Giovanni Alicò ^©  

(Catania, 1906 - Milano, 1971)

Alicò '64 signed lower right

Giovanni Alicò was born in Catania in 1906. A self-taught painter, his approach to art is free from pre-built constraints or tracks. In 1935 he settled first in Naples then in Milan. In 1942 he was present with a work at the XXIII Venice Biennale, and in the same year, he held his first personal exhibition at the Tornabuoni Gallery in Florence. Six years of activity in Argentina followed between 1948 and 1953, with three solo shows in Buenos Aires and many participations in group exhibitions in various national exhibitions in the cities of La Rioja, Santa Fè, Mendoza and Rosario. Returning to Italy, from the mid-fifties and throughout the following decade, there were several personal exhibitions in Catania, Milan, Rome and Como. It was the Suzzara Award in 1955 with the work Contadino che riposa, where the painter, freed from a cold realistic description and far from the neo-Cubism typical of the first post-war period, abandons himself to a painting of luministic suggestion, with large fields of greens, of grays, of earths, supported by a dense pictorial material defined by a thick contour line. The painting is currently kept in the Suzzara Civic Gallery of Contemporary Art. In 1957 he exhibited at the Galleria il Pincio in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, one of the most active realities in the panorama of art exhibitions, where Renato Guttuso and Carla Accardi also exhibited there. He began his artistic career by depicting in his painting the carts with the colorful stories of the puppets using preferably flat colors, then he introduces in his palette delicate, vibrant colors, and focuses on themes pervaded by a marked spirituality. Favorite subjects are female figures, still lifes and landscapes. In the 1950s, Giovanni Alicò approached his style to that of Guttuso, in the context of social realism. His attention is towards a synthetic figurative painting, which proceeds by suggestions in the general adherence to the themes of social realism. After 1960, an important poetic made of arabesques and luminous and chromatic effects enters his work and shaded furniture. Since 1967 anthropomorphic characters, a sort of ghosts, have appeared on these backgrounds, hovering in the space of the composition. The artist's latest production is instead characterized by paintings where signs, repeated geometric shapes and large splashes of color are rendered with intense and vivid colors, arriving at outcomes of an informal and material nature. Giovanni Alicò died in Catania in 1971. After his death, an important retrospective was set up at the Palazzo della Borsa in Catania in 1973. Many of his works are present in important private collections in Europe and America and in various art foundations.