ANTONIO CALDERARA WORKS

Antonio Calderara was an Italian painter and artist. He was born in Abbiategrasso on October 28, 1903, and his life unfolded between Milan and Lake Orta, a place of vacation and family origin residence. In particular, the latter would become over time a chosen place for artistic research, with the decision matured over time to live in Vacciago, a hamlet of Ameno, on the eastern shore. He began studying engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan but soon abandoned it, continuing to cultivate his artistic vocation as a self-taught artist. In 1932, Antonio Calderara met Carmela, who would become his future wife and with whom he would have a daughter, Gabriella. He married her in 1934 to satisfy his mother, who did not accept that her son lived in a free relationship without the bond of marriage.
It is not easy to categorize Antonio Calderara within a well-defined artistic line because he came into contact with many artistic personalities, both Italian and foreign, who strongly influenced him over time, drawing great inspiration and technical learning from all. It is possible to attribute to him an initial figurative period, under the influence of the early currents of the artistic group Novecento, with an inclination towards the use of color and light of the divisionists like Gaetano Previati, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, and Georges Seurat. Light would prove to be, at least in these early stages of study, the substance capable of permeating his metaphysical views, in which every element is connected and functional to the other. The entire 1920s and 1930s see the artist's painting engaged in landscapes and domestic scenes, firmly rooted in the Lombard tradition, moving along the tradition of Divisionism but also influenced by the Milanese experience of Novecento. In 1934, his first exhibition took place in Milan, at the Bolaffi Gallery, and shortly after he also exhibited in Orta, Pallanza, Omegna, and Domodossola.
In the mid-forties, Antonio Calderara suffered a severe family loss following the premature death of his daughter at the age of 11, an event that led him into a long personal and artistic crisis, lasting at least until the early fifties. During these years, the painter focused heavily on portraits, almost all dedicated to his wife, whom he saw rejuvenate and identify with his daughter. Woman Sewing from 1951 is part of his figurative works where the harmonies of colors give movement and lead to emotion in the contemplation of a common gesture, painted with small brush strokes in precise geometry and in transfigured details.
Since 1954, we see him moving towards an abstract painting in which he will particularly focus on the study of light with works where abstract and linear subjects explore light and color, in search of the essence of the artistic gesture. Antonio Calderara was no longer interested in the study of space and the third dimension but solely in the transformation of light into color, a change determined by the encounter with Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter and founder of Neoplasticism. A light takes shape that translates his aspiration to paint nothingness, the void, which is everything, silence, light, order, harmony, everything that can be identified with the infinite. As he himself would say, "the light that invades everything, that destroys everything to be the sole protagonist". With an ambition beyond the ordinary, Calderara reflected the idea that his painting originated from his own need for light, a timid light unaware of its importance, a light that gradually clarified itself to both the painter and itself, until it became the only conscious and responsible protagonist of his painting. In this period of his artistic production, his pencil drawings also hold particular significance, "paintings made with air" as Agnoldomenico Pica would say in the two books dedicated to them.
Abstract art arrives decisively in 1959 with the Spazio-luce series, which continues throughout the sixties and definitively aligns him with all the artists of abstract expressionism. Thus begins what he himself defines as "his new adventure", starting non-figurative painting, a human representation in a space of light, nothing that aspired to be a geometric figure. Antonio Calderara becomes particularly known in Germany during these years, where he fully expresses the ambition of an image reality, which is no longer reality, but the highest, purest, most abstract expression of that reality. In this order, time loses the sense of its measure to dissolve into limitless space, into light without sources.
In the 1960s, Antonio Calderara survived three heart attacks, episodes that limited his painting and confined him to bed for long periods. In 1974, the artist received a gold medal from the Provincial Tourism Board of Novara to "testify to my activity as a painter and my love for Lake Orta," and in 1978 he was struck by a severe form of pneumonia that kept him bedridden for a long period, until June of that year when his heart stopped beating: "when I am at the end of my days, I will be happy to say that I lived by painting." Much of Calderara's artistic production is exhibited at the 17th-century building in Vacciago, on Lake Orta. A unique collection characterized by the international scope of the painter and distinguished by consequential traits: the common thread is light, the sole and true protagonist of all his artistic production."