Antonio Calderara
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 holiday and family residence location. In particular, the latter would become over time a chosen place for artistic research, with the decision made over time to live in Vacciago, a hamlet of Ameno, on the eastern shore. He began studies in engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan but soon abandoned them, 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 had a daughter, Gabriella. He married her in 1934 to please his mother, who did not accept that her son lived a free relationship without the marital bond.
It is not easy to classify Antonio Calderara into a well-defined artistic line because he came into contact with many artistic personalities, Italian and foreign, who strongly influenced him over time, drawing great inspiration and technical learning from all. It is possible to attribute to him a first figurative period, under the influence of the early currents of the artistic group Novecento, with the attitude towards the use of color and light of the divisionists such as Gaetano Previati, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo and Georges Seurat. The light would be for the painter, at least in these early study phases, the substance capable of permeating his metaphysical views, in which every element is connected and functional to the other. All the twenties and thirties 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 conditioned 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, 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 episode that led him to a long personal and artistic crisis, lasting at least until the early fifties. In these years the painter focused heavily on portraits, almost all dedicated to his wife, whom he saw rejuvenate and identify with the daughter. Woman Sewing from 1951 is part of his figurative artworks in which the color harmonies give movement and lead to emotion in the contemplation of a common gesture, painted with small brushstrokes in a precise geometry and in transfigured details.
From 1954 we see him moving towards abstract painting in which he particularly focused on the study of light with artworks where abstract and linear subjects investigate light and color, searching for the essence of the artistic gesture. Antonio Calderara was no longer interested in the study of space and the third dimension but only in the transformation of light into color, a change determined by the encounter with Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter founder of Neoplasticism. A light takes shape that translates his aspiration to paint nothingness, the void, which is everything, silence, light, order, harmony, all that can be identified with infinity. As he himself said "the light that invades everything, that destroys everything to be the sole protagonist". With an extraordinary ambition, Calderara reflected the idea that his painting originated from his own need for light, a shy and unaware light of its importance, a light that little by little clarified itself to itself and to the painter, until becoming the only conscious and responsible protagonist of his painting. In this period of his artistic production, his pencil drawings also have particular importance, "paintings made with air" as Agnoldomenico Pica said in the two books dedicated to them.
Abstract art arrives clearly in 1959 with the Space-Light series that extends throughout the sixties and definitively places him alongside all the artists of abstract expressionism. Thus begins what he himself defines as "his new adventure", starting non-figurative painting, human representation in a space of light, nothing aspiring to be a geometric figure. Antonio Calderara became particularly known in Germany in these years, where he fully expressed 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 cancel itself in limitless space, in light without sources.
During the sixties Antonio Calderara survived three heart attacks, episodes that limited his painting and confined him to bed for long periods. In 1974 the artist received from the Provincial Tourism Authority of Novara the gold medal 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 forced him to bed for a long period, until June of that year when his heart stopped beating: "when I reach 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 seventeenth-century building in Vacciago, on Lake Orta. A unique collection characterized by the international breath of the painter and distinguished by consequential traits: the common thread is light, the only and true protagonist of all his artistic production.
