With this piece, we want to remember an artist who, through his exploration of line and colour, left his mark on abstraction as we understand it today. Biggi is from ABC-ARTE
That Gastone Biggi (Rome 1925; Tordenaso di Langhirano, 2014) was not an artist for the masses must also have been thought by his friend Piero, whose surname was Dorazio and who wrote in 1967: “A superficial observer would say that his subject is ‘black and white dots’ on a black and white background”. For the record, this sentence comes from the same text from which the title of the anthology dedicated to Biggi by ABC ARTE, La pittura si fa sul serio (Painting is serious business), curated by Flaminio Gualdoni, is taken. But there are no superficial observers here, right?
From the years of Gruppo Uno (shared since 1962 with Frascà, Santoro, Pace, Carrino and Uncini) to the late 2000s, this anthology floats in Biggi's world (a useful clarification to frame his temperament: “Roman from Rome”, born in the legendary Rione Monti), offering a less strictly encyclopaedic and more human perspective. A perspective reasonably suited to sensitising the visitor, as when observing a romantic Chicago night, where the cold of the night is a chromatic interweaving of dark blue aimed at concealing the warmth of an underlying red. We are in 2004, some forty years after the Continui series, in which grids of signs and lines dictate the pictorial space. And, lo and behold, Continuo 8 is right there next to it. It is there to tell us that, forty years later, Biggi has matured while remaining fundamentally himself, believing in his pictorial origins and growing in proportion to his research. He has evolved, taking the elements of a pictorial system that was decidedly radical for its time to another dimension (more emotional and, why not, more narrative). Take a look at L'ora di Angelico (Angelico's Hour), from 2002, and then you can tell us what you think.
It should also be noted that Biggi, in the blatantly horizontal context of painting, was someone who thought vertically. This can already be glimpsed in the overlaps of Chicago Night. This can be intuited now, because if painting is taken seriously, as they say, every element must be graphically stratifiable, therefore technically perceptible and, ultimately, a unified protagonist of the whole of which it is a part. Cielo della battaglia is a small work on paper from 1982, included in the exhibition on a wall of works with similar characteristics. It is a work that stands out in presenting Biggi's attachment to the pre-eminence of every technique (tempera, pastel and pencil), every mark and colour, at least as much as it is capable of highlighting how the artist puts each of these pre-eminences at the service of a vertical conception of the visual product. This concept has, on the one hand, enabled Biggi to upload (to use a fitting, albeit irritating, term, which never frees the writer from the guilt of having included it) pictorial abstraction, making it decidedly more akin to our three-dimensional universe; on the other hand, it has enabled him to refine the work of art by following a truly “holistic” vision, where no medium, sign or colour stands alone, but when variously inserted into a context, they serve to create the context itself, from both a formal and narrative point of view. If you don't believe us, take a look at the small Fleurs 195 Syntias: in 2010, Biggi understood everything about painting.
