Giovanni Alicò

(Catania, 1906 - Milano, 1971)

Giovanni Alicò was born in Catania in 1906. A self-taught painter, his approach to art is free from constraints or pre-constructed tracks. In 1935 he settled first in Naples and 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 solo exhibition at the Galleria Tornabuoni in Florence. This was followed, between 1948 and 1953, by six years of activity in Argentina, with three solo exhibitions in Buenos Aires and many participations in group exhibitions in various national salons in the cities of La Rioja, Santa Fè, 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 was awarded the Suzzara Prize in 1955 with the work Peasant Resting, where the painter, freed from a cold realistic description and far from the neo-cubist schemes typical of the first post-war period, abandons himself to a painting of luministic suggestion, with large areas of green, grey, earth, supported by a dense pictorial material defined by a thick contour line. The painting is currently preserved 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 realities in the panorama of art exhibitions, where Renato Guttuso and Carla Accardi also exhibited. He began his artistic career by depicting in his painting carts with colorful stories of the puppets using preferably flat colors, subsequently introducing delicate, vibrant colors into his palette, and focusing on themes pervaded by a marked spirituality. His 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 focus was on synthetic figurative painting, which proceeded by suggestions in general adherence to the themes of social realism. After 1960, an important poetics made of arabesques and light and chromatic effects, blurred movements entered his work. From 1967 onwards, anthropomorphic characters appeared on these backgrounds, a sort of ghosts, which hovered in the space of the composition. The artist's final production was instead characterised by paintings where signs, repeated geometric shapes and large patches of colour were rendered with intense and vivid colours, leading to informal and material results. 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.