Remo Bianco Foundation

"I lived in a courtyard with 60 other children and believed God would save me from every danger." The courtyard was one of many in Milan's working-class district, in Via Giusti, in the heart of the old city, near the Arena. Here Remo Bianchi (in art Bianco) spent a happy childhood, surrounded by the affection of his parents and his sister Lyda, his elder by a year. Only one shadow: the death of his little twin brother Romolo.

Remo was born at Dergano, near Affori, June 3, 1922. His father, Guido, was "an anarchist persecuted for his ideas," and his mother, Giovanna Ripamonti, an "expressive, dramatic woman of the people," practiced cartomancy.

When he wasn't doing his school-work, Remo would draw and try to earn some money by helping the neighborhood shopkeepers and artisans.
It was in 1939 and he was attending the Brera night-school for drawing (directed by Aldo Carpi) when, one evening, he saw Filippo de Pisis for the first time. In those days it was not uncommon for masters to go to the Academy to look at the works of the young students, and give them some sound advice. That time it was his turn. De Pisis noticed him. Remo was only seventeen, and for the young artist the meeting was decisive, the birth of a lasting friendship: "De Pisis for me was an outstanding master (above all a master of life), he directed me towards a broad artistic culture, even if in a way it was anti-academic." In his studio, where he often went, he met celebrities of the world of art, literature and film: Soffici, Montale, Savinio, Carrà, Sironi, De Sica...

In 1941 he enrolled in the navy as a machine-gun pointer on a destroyer. His family (except his father) had been evacuated to Sassuolo. In 1943 his ship was hit and, after being ship wrecked, he was rescued by the English and interned in Tunisia. It was his first contact with the "Orient," with the Moslem world and its fascinating culture, its desert landscapes, mosaics, ceramics and the stuccoes that adorned palaces and mosques. He fell ill and was sent back to ltaly, at Sassuolo.

In 1944 they came back to Milan. The city suffered bombings and hunger, but their house was miraculously intact. He travelled through war-torn Italy, went to Venice several times and in 1946 returned to the Brera. He had reached the most important decision of his life: he would become an artist. 1948 was the turning-point: he had his first one-man shows (two: one in June and the other in August) in the spaces of the Gruppo Esagono, and gave up academic exercises to devote himself to painting on glass and on sheets of transparent plexiglass, which when overlaid created effects of depth and motion. They were the first 3Ds or three-dimensional pictures, which he would keep on doing, on many occasions, up to the sixties. At the same time he began making his first plaster casts, what he himself was fond of defining as "traces of man": tires, manholes, traces...in other words, that "universal documentation" with which he catalogued "all the things that came in touch" with him, as he wrote some years later in the Manifesto dell'Arte lmprontale (1956). Using the same process he created the Bassorilievi in gomma (midfifties), the Impronte sonore (1961) and the Impronte viventi (1964). When he was twenty-eight he spent some time in Cantello, near Milan, where he was allowed to stay in the local nursing home. There he spent his time doing portraits of the aged or the diseased, studying their worn, suffering bodies, and helplessly watching the signs of death creep over their faces.

In 1952, after being introduced by Lucio Fontana, Bianco exhibited his 3Ds in the Galleria del Cavallino of Venice. He created "3Ds in plastic, multiplicable, with abstract drawings on three different levels, mounted on transparent frames." He drew "also some 3Ds on backgrounds treated with fluorescent colors, or with variable backgrounds, which owing to a specially-designed interspace were "filled with rice, file dust, gravel, etc."

The following year marked his meeting with Virgilio Gianni, the Milanese industrialist who immediately became his friend and patron. They met casually, at Brugherio, in the green house of the clinic where de Pisis was spending the last months of his life. From then on, Remo Bianco's financial worries were over.

Thanks to Gianni, in 1965 he was able to make a prolonged visit to the United States: "I immediately discovered very important aesthetic channels, Burri for instance." He met Klein, Donati, Marcarelli and Pollock. Right away he felt a great affinity of temperament with the latter, but he was sorry not to have had time to develop that new friendship. He had braught with him several 3Ds, he had even shown them at the Village Art Center af New York, but with little success. Compared to abstract expressionism, dripping, and the gestuality of American painting, his art was "colder, more cerebral. Then he painted canvases and paper where signs and colors emerged from liberated and liberating dripping. He began cutting these suggestive images into small regular squares, recomposing them in original mosaics: the Collages. "Sometimes-the artist recalled-one of those pieces was resumed and enlarged, creating a large particular detail which precisely was called "particularism."

After having practiced other materials, after having gathered all sorts of discarded, worthless objects to put them in a number of small cellophane bags (Testimonianze), creating original "archives" of recollections, in 1957 Bianco undertook the work which would beyond all doubt be his most personal and win him the greatest recognition of the critics and the public: the Tableaux dorés.

Meanwhile he travelled abroad more and more often: in 1959 he went to Egypt (Luxor, Aswan, Giza), then Munich, Stockholm, Paris, in '61 and 62 to Iran... He would always came back with books, pictures, recollections jotted down on sheets of paper or engraved forever in his mind.

A tireless seeker and experimentor, he kept on designing new forms of expression: they included inflatable sculptures (he gave them up right away because they were like Piero Manzoni's) and sleep-sculptures; smell-sculptures and immaterial ones (slides projected onto clauds of steam); spaces filled with synthetic fog and unstable sculptures (black washing-machines continuously whirling all kinds of abjects).

In 1962 there were the Opere candizionanti, light bulbs that produced deafening noises and blinding flashes, which led him to the idea of the interferenza, designing special glasses allowing to observe reality from several points of view.

He went to Stockholm several times to perfect his studies on Sephadex. In the laboratories of the Uppsala Pharmacy he had undertaken experiments to "understand and see the noumenon of the infinite trans formation af matter" and had written the first Manifesto dell'Arte chimica. It was in 1964, and that same year in Venice his Sculture vive caused a furor. Following the reactions his models pravoked in the audience, the next year Bianco undertook studies on mental diseases (a topic that had always fascinated him), perfecting psychotherapeutic structures capable at creating a cathartic-compensatory atmosphere and liberating the "patient" from the intense emotional states tormenting him. 1965 was also the year of the Secondo Manifesto dell'Arte chimica, of the "Super structures" (Neve, Trafitture, Sculture calde - Snaw, Piercings, Hot Sculptures), the Racconti (Stories) and the photographic Ricostruzioni. Once again far ahead of his time, Bianco understood that he no longer had time to paint or construct, so he had photographer friends document his performances.

In 1968, in Basle, another important encaunter, the one with Mark Tobey.
He called the last cycle, developed in the seventies, sadico, mistico elementare (sadistic, mystical elementary), attuned to the feverish historical and social times.

Those were years of intense work, and in order to carry it out in the best way he used several studios, one being in Paris.

In 1972, after having conceived the new Campanile for the piazza San Marco in Venice, after having executed the cycle 01 the Manichini (Mannequins) and the Quadri Parlanti (Speaking pictures), he "appropriated" the staircase of the Galleria Il Naviglio of Milan and each step became a confession: "They never took me seriously, I bombarded them all with too many ideas, too many intuitions, too much disorder" and, severa steps higher: "Unfortunately someone caught on, and took these things, and made them his own... That's how my tree gave so many flowers and so little fruit."
Those were years of reflection of evaluation, of accounts. Even if recognition lasted, the time had come to put some order into what had been achieved. More than once Bianco had thought about an autobiography, more than once he had wanted to write or record the story of his life, but, above all, more than once he had strived to arrange the chronology of his work; anc this, still today, precisely because he was so eclectic, remains difficult to establish.

In the eighties, in 1984-85 to be exact, he went to India.

Then his health began to decline, and the first symptoms appeared of the incurable disease that, on February 23, 1988, bore him to his grave. Two years later, the Palazzo Reale of Milan made a tribute to his memory with a handsome retrospective.


	Remo Bianco biography edited by Lorella Giudici "I lived in a courtyard with 60 other children and believed God would save me from every danger." The courtyard was one of many in Milan's working-class district, in Via Giusti, in the heart of the old city, near the Arena. Here Remo Bianchi (in art Bianco) spent a happy childhood, surrounded by the affection of his parents and his sister Lyda, his elder by a year. Only one shadow: the death of his little twin brother Romolo. Remo was born at Dergano, near Affori, June 3, 1922. His father, Guido, was "an anarchist persecuted for his ideas," and his mother, Giovanna Ripamonti, an "expressive, dramatic woman of the people," practiced cartomancy. When he wasn't doing his school-work, Remo would draw and try to earn some money by helping the neighborhood shopkeepers and artisans. It was in 1939 and he was attending the Brera night-school for drawing (directed by Aldo Carpi) when, one evening, he saw Filippo de Pisis for the first time. In those days it was not uncommon for masters to go to the Academy to look at the works of the young students, and give them some sound advice. That time it was his turn. De Pisis noticed him. Remo was only seventeen, and for the young artist the meeting was decisive, the birth of a lasting friendship: "De Pisis for me was an outstanding master (above all a master of life), he directed me towards a broad artistic culture, even if in a way it was anti-academic." In his studio, where he often went, he met celebrities of the world of art, literature and film: Soffici, Montale, Savinio, Carrà, Sironi, De Sica... In 1941 he enrolled in the navy as a machine-gun pointer on a destroyer. His family (except his father) had been evacuated to Sassuolo. In 1943 his ship was hit and, after being ship wrecked, he was rescued by the English and interned in Tunisia. It was his first contact with the "Orient," with the Moslem world and its fascinating culture, its desert landscapes, mosaics, ceramics and the stuccoes that adorned palaces and mosques. He fell ill and was sent back to ltaly, at Sassuolo. In 1944 they came back to Milan. The city suffered bombings and hunger, but their house was miraculously intact. He travelled through war-torn Italy, went to Venice several times and in 1946 returned to the Brera. He had reached the most important decision of his life: he would become an artist. 1948 was the turning-point: he had his first one-man shows (two: one in June and the other in August) in the spaces of the Gruppo Esagono, and gave up academic exercises to devote himself to painting on glass and on sheets of transparent plexiglass, which when overlaid created effects of depth and motion. They were the first 3Ds or three-dimensional pictures, which he would keep on doing, on many occasions, up to the sixties. At the same time he began making his first plaster casts, what he himself was fond of defining as "traces of man": tires, manholes, traces...in other words, that "universal documentation" with which he catalogued "all the things that came in touch" with him, as he wrote some years later in the Manifesto dell'Arte lmprontale (1956). Using the same process he created the Bassorilievi in gomma (midfifties), the Impronte sonore (1961) and the Impronte viventi (1964). When he was twenty-eight he spent some time in Cantello, near Milan, where he was allowed to stay in the local nursing home. There he spent his time doing portraits of the aged or the diseased, studying their worn, suffering bodies, and helplessly watching the signs of death creep over their faces. In 1952, after being introduced by Lucio Fontana, Bianco exhibited his 3Ds in the Galleria del Cavallino of Venice. He created "3Ds in plastic, multiplicable, with abstract drawings on three different levels, mounted on transparent frames." He drew "also some 3Ds on backgrounds treated with fluorescent colors, or with variable backgrounds, which owing to a specially-designed interspace were "filled with rice, file dust, gravel, etc." The following year marked his meeting with Virgilio Gianni, the Milanese industrialist who immediately became his friend and patron. They met casually, at Brugherio, in the green house of the clinic where de Pisis was spending the last months of his life. From then on, Remo Bianco's financial worries were over. Thanks to Gianni, in 1965 he was able to make a prolonged visit to the United States: "I immediately discovered very important aesthetic channels, Burri for instance." He met Klein, Donati, Marcarelli and Pollock. Right away he felt a great affinity of temperament with the latter, but he was sorry not to have had time to develop that new friendship. He had braught with him several 3Ds, he had even shown them at the Village Art Center af New York, but with little success. Compared to abstract expressionism, dripping, and the gestuality of American painting, his art was "colder, more cerebral. Then he painted canvases and paper where signs and colors emerged from liberated and liberating dripping. He began cutting these suggestive images into small regular squares, recomposing them in original mosaics: the Collages. "Sometimes-the artist recalled-one of those pieces was resumed and enlarged, creating a large particular detail which precisely was called "particularism." After having practiced other materials, after having gathered all sorts of discarded, worthless objects to put them in a number of small cellophane bags (Testimonianze), creating original "archives" of recollections, in 1957 Bianco undertook the work which would beyond all doubt be his most personal and win him the greatest recognition of the critics and the public: the Tableaux dorés. Meanwhile he travelled abroad more and more often: in 1959 he went to Egypt (Luxor, Aswan, Giza), then Munich, Stockholm, Paris, in '61 and 62 to Iran... He would always came back with books, pictures, recollections jotted down on sheets of paper or engraved forever in his mind. A tireless seeker and experimentor, he kept on designing new forms of expression: they included inflatable sculptures (he gave them up right away because they were like Piero Manzoni's) and sleep-sculptures; smell-sculptures and immaterial ones (slides projected onto clauds of steam); spaces filled with synthetic fog and unstable sculptures (black washing-machines continuously whirling all kinds of abjects). In 1962 there were the Opere candizionanti, light bulbs that produced deafening noises and blinding flashes, which led him to the idea of the interferenza, designing special glasses allowing to observe reality from several points of view. He went to Stockholm several times to perfect his studies on Sephadex. In the laboratories of the Uppsala Pharmacy he had undertaken experiments to "understand and see the noumenon of the infinite trans formation af matter" and had written the first Manifesto dell'Arte chimica. It was in 1964, and that same year in Venice his Sculture vive caused a furor. Following the reactions his models pravoked in the audience, the next year Bianco undertook studies on mental diseases (a topic that had always fascinated him), perfecting psychotherapeutic structures capable at creating a cathartic-compensatory atmosphere and liberating the "patient" from the intense emotional states tormenting him. 1965 was also the year of the Secondo Manifesto dell'Arte chimica, of the "Super structures" (Neve, Trafitture, Sculture calde - Snaw, Piercings, Hot Sculptures), the Racconti (Stories) and the photographic Ricostruzioni. Once again far ahead of his time, Bianco understood that he no longer had time to paint or construct, so he had photographer friends document his performances. In 1968, in Basle, another important encaunter, the one with Mark Tobey. He called the last cycle, developed in the seventies, sadico, mistico elementare (sadistic, mystical elementary), attuned to the feverish historical and social times. Those were years of intense work, and in order to carry it out in the best way he used several studios, one being in Paris. In 1972, after having conceived the new Campanile for the piazza San Marco in Venice, after having executed the cycle 01 the Manichini (Mannequins) and the Quadri Parlanti (Speaking pictures), he "appropriated" the staircase of the Galleria Il Naviglio of Milan and each step became a confession: "They never took me seriously, I bombarded them all with too many ideas, too many intuitions, too much disorder" and, severa steps higher: "Unfortunately someone caught on, and took these things, and made them his own... That's how my tree gave so many flowers and so little fruit." Those were years of reflection of evaluation, of accounts. Even if recognition lasted, the time had come to put some order into what had been achieved. More than once Bianco had thought about an autobiography, more than once he had wanted to write or record the story of his life, but, above all, more than once he had strived to arrange the chronology of his work; anc this, still today, precisely because he was so eclectic, remains difficult to establish. In the eighties, in 1984-85 to be exact, he went to India. Then his health began to decline, and the first symptoms appeared of the incurable disease that, on February 23, 1988, bore him to his grave. Two years later, the Palazzo Reale of Milan made a tribute to his memory with a handsome retrospective.