Page 28 - Studio International - September 1973

association of non-figurative artists, among (Left)
whom were Max Bill, Kandinsky and Fausto Melotti
Sculpture n. 16 1935
Vantongerloo. Contemporaneously a movement
was formed in Italy for the renovation of (Below)
Fausto Melotti
graphic design, based upon principles derived Sculpture n. 21 1935
from abstract art. Its review, Cambo Grafico, Coll. Marlborough, Rome
had as its main aim the collaboration of the new Photo: Ugo Mulas
artists with avant-garde technicians. Veronesi
contributed to this review for over six years,
with cover designs, lay-outs, drawings and
polemical texts, until in 1939 at the Equipe
Gallery he once more put on a show of abstract
works. It is clear that abstraction for this
meditative artist did not act as evocative or
fanciful pure poetry, but as a new order. The
pure rigour of his compositions responded to a
need for clarity and practicality. Veronesi
penetrated the living heart of the abstract
movement, in much the same way as happened
at the Bauhaus in fact, seeking the renewal of
architecture, and of all the applied arts, a new
conception of the arts and crafts in relation to
industry, and with it the social renewal which
led to persecution and destruction by the
Nazis. For his part, Veronesi, consistently
developing these principles and, at the same
time, trying to animate various focal centres and
related movements, went beyond the limits of
the canvas, of pure painting, and turned to
experiments with non-figurative stage design,
abstract photography, pushing abstraction
towards the applied arts.
There were, however, other artists who loved
silence, reflection, interior resonance. Contact
with everyday surroundings and their
requirements is not denied but becomes the
material of a long meditation. These are
temperaments who feel the need to filter every
sensation, every emotion and mood, since they
tend to perceive the least apparent
relationships by a continuous intervention of the
mind. Anyone who knows Mario Radice a little
is struck by his candour, his truly poetic
humility, his limpid morality, his absolute
need for clarity, which do not invalidate his
sensibility and the suggestion of his colour, but
subject them to an order of relationships.
Geometric harmony is not a pre-established
norm, but is born of the very nature of the
rhythm organized under vigilant control.
The consistency of Radice is not then merely
of an aesthetic and formalistic order. It responds
even to moral premises. Hence his adherence,
since 1934, with his first abstract murals in the
Casa del Popolo (formerly the Casa del Fascio,
Trans.) of Como by the architect Terragni, to a
culture derived from neoplasticism, and from
Klee as well as Kandinsky. A moral
intransigence pushed him rigorously to the
measure, to the invention of relationships. The
purity of invention in non-figurative
compositions was no myth for Radice and
answered the most vital — one could say, the
total — aspirations of his language. But beyond
every neat and tidy distinction between abstract
and figurative language, the personality of this
painter is imposed with originality and clarity
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