SANTOMASO Giuseppe

Giuseppe Santomaso (Venice, 1907–1990) developed one of the most refined explorations in twentieth-century Italian abstract painting. His work grew from a deep connection with Venice, not so much as a repertoire of recognizable views as an experience of light, color, and layering. In his canvases and prints, fields of color, marks, and intervals seem to preserve the memory of walls, reflections, and architecture, while gradually freeing themselves from direct landscape representation.

Training and engagement with Europe

Having trained in the Venetian milieu, Santomaso soon developed an interest in modern European painting. Attending the Biennales and engaging with the avant-garde helped move him away from purely descriptive figuration. In the 1940s, he took part in efforts to renew Italian art and was among the artists involved in the New Front of the Arts, founded in 1946 to promote an approach open to the transformations of contemporary language.

The subsequent polarization of the debate between realism and abstraction led him to consolidate an independent position. In the early 1950s, he joined the Group of Eight, championed by the critic Lionello Venturi, alongside figures such as Afro, Birolli, Corpora, Moreni, Morlotti, Turcato and Vedova. The aim was not to impose a uniform style, but to recognize the freedom of painting as common ground. In this context, Santomaso developed a language that would maintain a particularly subtle relationship with the visual memory of his hometown.

Color as the architecture of the surface

In his mature paintings, color does not simply describe things: it constructs space. Light and dark fields, overlays, glazes and sudden bursts of color create a shifting balance in which each element changes the perception of the others. The painting sometimes seems to take shape like a wall worn down by time, and at other times like a collection of suspended luminous fragments. It is an abstract vision, but one that is not divorced from sensory experience.

Venetian light acts more like a memory than a naturalistic effect. Even when canals or palaces are absent, the interplay between material and reflection can evoke the city. This ability to transform visual information into pictorial structure distinguishes Santomaso from a purely geometric abstraction: his surfaces retain an atmospheric, almost tactile quality that invites slow contemplation.

Lithographs, engravings and prints

Printmaking occupies a significant place in his career. Lithographs and other prints allow him to explore the relationship between mark and color on a different scale from that of large canvases. In lithography, the planographic matrix allows for chromatic transitions and qualities of line that can engage closely with painting; other processes, however, produce specific effects and must be identified on a case-by-case basis.

When evaluating a print, it is important to distinguish an original print conceived by the artist from an editorial reproduction. The signature, edition, paper, printer, and bibliographic references help reconstruct the work's history. Santomaso remains a key figure because he showed how abstraction can arise from a concrete experience of the world and transform it into a language of extraordinary chromatic sensitivity.