Antonio Sanfilippo

Antonio Sanfilippo (Partanna, 1923 – Rome, 1980) was one of the protagonists of Italian abstraction after the Second World War. His painting has built a universe of minute signs, mobile structures and chromatic rhythms, in which the surface does not represent objects but records tensions and relationships. Observing his works one often has the sensation of being faced with an unknown writing: a language that does not ask to be translated into words, because its meaning arises from the very movement of the forms.

Rome and the Forma 1 season

After his artistic training in Sicily, Sanfilippo settled in Rome and participated in the climate of renewal that followed the Second World War. In 1947 he was among the signatories of the Forma 1 manifesto, together with artists such as Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Achille Perilli and Giulio Turcato. The group claimed the possibility of reconciling a progressive political orientation with the freedom of abstract research, at a time when the Italian debate often contrasted realism and non-figuration.

For Sanfilippo this choice was not just theoretical. Abandoning representation meant questioning painting in its essential elements: color, sign, distribution of forms, the relationship between empty and full. His early works show a construction still close to post-war geometries; progressively, however, the language becomes more free and personal. The compositions lose rigidity, while small elements thicken and disperse on the surface.

The birth of Forma 1 must be understood in the climate of cultural reconstruction of republican Italy. For the young artists involved, defending abstraction meant escaping the idea that a work had to directly illustrate a political message to have civil value. The freedom of form was itself a stance, because it claimed autonomy of research and openness towards Europe. Sanfilippo participates in this comparison through a language that does not remain immobile: the first geometric structures constitute a phase of exploration, from which a more complex system of signs gradually emerges. Even the relationship with Carla Accardi, companion for an important part of his life and protagonist of an independent research, belongs to this context of exchanges and discussions. The affinities do not erase the differences between the two paths.

The sign as a living organism

The most recognizable feature of his maturity is a pattern of short signs, curves, fragments and chromatic nuclei that seem to move in space. They are not letters in the traditional sense, even when they resemble their appearance. They are visual units that acquire value through mutual distances, repetition and variation. A dense area can coexist with an almost empty field; a rhythmic sequence can suddenly interrupt, leaving the gaze with the task of rebuilding a balance.

The proximity to some experiences of the European Informal does not cancel the specificity of his work. Sanfilippo does not entrust everything to the impulsive gesture: he often organizes the surface with an extremely controlled compositional sensitivity. The color, sometimes intense and contrasting, sometimes more measured, does not simply fill the contours, but determines the breathing of the image. The work is born from the encounter between apparent spontaneity and structure.

The almost alphabetical character of his compositions can lead us to look for hidden messages, but it would be simplistic to treat each shape as a letter to be deciphered. Painting operates first and foremost through rhythm. Some signs come together to form a nucleus, others remain isolated; the distance between the elements becomes just as important as their shape. The spectator is led to follow different paths, without necessarily finding a single centre. The arrangement may evoke a constellation, a score, or a transforming organism, but these analogies help describe the visual experience, they are not literal definitions. The quality of the color accentuates the mobility of the whole: even minimal variations in tone change the relationship between figure and ground, giving the surfaces a particular vibration. Another aspect to observe is the scale: in smaller compositions the sign requires a close look, while in large ones the plot can be perceived as an overall field even before the individual elements. This oscillation between detail and whole makes the real dimension of the work particularly important.

Works on paper and graphic research

Drawing and graphics are privileged tools for approaching his language. On the sheet, the sign can manifest itself with particular immediacy, showing how a small variation in direction or thickness modifies the rhythm of the whole. In printed works it is essential to identify the technique actually used: lithography, screen printing and engraving follow different procedures and must not be automatically attributed on the basis of the appearance of the image.

For correct cataloging, the presence of signature, possible numbering, size of sheet and image, publisher and documentation are important. The historical value of his research, however, goes beyond the single technique. Sanfilippo contributed to demonstrating that abstract painting can possess a strong expressive quality without relying on narrative: the surface becomes a sensitive space, crossed by signs that seem to have a life of their own.

When moving from painting to paper, an already resolved composition is not automatically transferred. Drawing allows us to verify the autonomy of each trace and its relationship with the white space, while printing introduces the problem of the matrix and repeatability. In a lithograph the sign can retain a notable proximity to the gesture; in screen printing the image is constructed through controlled passages of colour; In intaglio engraving, grooves, pressure and inking come into play. These differences are relevant both for understanding artistic research and for correctly describing a specimen. A numbered sheet is not necessarily a silkscreen, just as a signature does not alone demonstrate authenticity. Accurate documentation should link each work to its edition, without confusing the stylistic identity of the artist with the technical identification of the individual work.