Remo Bianco Foundation

"I am a lonely seeker"
Remo Bianco

A singular, undefinable artist, Remo Bianco created an eclectic work in the noblest sense of the word: a constantly heretic work (heretic even towards itself), that lies outside of categories and that, maybe for that very reason, was never thoroughly understood. Living in a state of perpetual expressive adolescence, repeating his ironic, Palazzeschi-style saying: "And let me have fun!," Bianco always considered art to be a game, with a playful freedom and a linguistic volubility streaked with conceptual dadaism. In other words, Bianco played with art, clearly knowing, as I have already written:' that all we can do is either play or be played. But beneath the surface of the game, an authentic, long-suffering existential concern surfaces in his work: an awareness of pain, of aggressivity, of injustice, a heart-breaking feeling of time going by and that we cannot stop.

"I will go on travelling the world over and finding out that man is bad under every sun," he himself wrote.' And also: "I gave and was subjected to every violence."

Bianco's entire poetic world is nothing but a long, unbroken autobiographical page: a page from a diary where the artist describes himself and his relationship with the world.

Bianco worked all his life on what Proust called "the immense edifice of memory": he gathered, indexed, put together the traces and imprints of life. He was heedful of the smallest things, the most neglected, seeking to rescue them, to preserve them, to ennoble them by giving them an aesthetic statute. But he also lined up and mixed up, like a modern Bembo, an interminable bunch of tarots: silent tarots, nameless and faceless, as suits the sensibility of our times, that can no longer provide answers, only questions.

And what are tarots? They are a game that represents the game of life, meaning the game Remo Bianco was the most interested in.

His entire work, actually, projects a sense of effervescent, untiring creativity, that explores every artistic genre: painting, sculpture, installation, collage, performance, readymade. His work is a crucible of ideas, as well as a Chamber of Wonders, where objects and images of every shape and kind undergo metamorphoses, deformations, enchantments, experiencing sadisms and reliefs, cruelty and tenderness. So approaching the vast corpus of his work is like entering the magi's den: entering the concentric circles and the short circuits of a language that endlessly reinvented itself. And precisely by its overwhelming richness, for a long time it was eluded and misunderstood.

Perhaps Bianco himself was aware of this when he wrote: "They never really took me seriously. I bombarded them with too many ideas, too many intuitions, too much disorder."

A Question of Method

It is not a simple matter to try to try to sort out Remo Bianco's vast, multi-faceted work. It is not simple for a number of reasons. The first and most important is intrinsic to the artist's artistic theory: a theory not only little prone to philology, but even to a defined, or definitive, division in periods.

Remo Bianco's works were always in progress, in the course of becoming. Bianco proceeded by cycles of works that were not completed, but were re-thought and re-worked, sometimes years later. His creative urge, insensitive to the self-indulgence of formalism, yet in its own way never satisfied, expressed itself in results that overlapped and thronged like a river, chaotic, in waves, spurred by an emotional surging that was never disciplined nor could be disciplined.

That gave rise to the artist's constant metamorphism. In a century like ours, that has made the stylistic mark the distinctive feature of art, often leading to a worn-out theory of repetition and variation, if not actual brands, Remo Bianco's work stands out from the others by its restless, fleeting physiognomy: a shifting physiognomy, typical of an artist who refused to give up any of the expressive paths he had undertaken, but instead held them all in hand, like the strings of a puppeteer.

So it would be futile to try to analyze Bianco's corpus in terms of clearly defined expressive periods, even if there were certainly moments that featured more one or the other kind of investigation.

If we add to this trait of Remo Bianco's work another equally significant one, meaning the artist's utter neglect of any kind of cataloguing, and the carelessness with which he signed or dated the work (the dates, when there are any, always have to be interpreted); if furthermore we realize how scarce the evidence (writings, catalogues, publications) that could provide stable points in the tangled skein of Bianco's production is, we understand that every date attributed to his works contains an element of critical randomness which will be difficult to eliminate.

In this piece we shall therefore take into consideration this "original sin" (but might it not also be a virtue?) of Remo Bianco's research. We shall seek as much as possible to specify circumstances and chronology, also with the help of Lorella Giudici's catalogue: she carefully reconstructed, where information could be found, the exhibition history and the bibliography of the entire Gianni collection. But we shall not strive to entrench arbitrarily what arose like a fluid element, to block with a date that could just as well belong to a two-year or five-year period, or even a decade of work. Such an operation, seemingly philological, would actually be the opposite of philology.

And to wind up these precisions, we should specify that we are referring here essentially to the works of Virgilio Gianni's collection, while situating them in Bianco's entire career.

The Gianni collection, besides, offers a complete vision of the artist's work, as a result of a singular existential fact, connecting the Lombard industrialist with Remo Bianco.

I have had the opportunity to meet, in the rather lengthy period of work related to this book, Virgilio Gianni. And I have rarely seen in a collector such an intense fondness for an artist (such an intense fondness as to be one-sided), as is his towards Remo Bianco. More than being in love with the works, as is usually the case with collectors, Gianni is in love with their author. And his love is a nearly paternal feeling, spurring him to seek the best way to make Bianco known, so as to spread and promote his work; a love that even today, after so many years, leads him to earnestly wonder whether perhaps, at the time of their friendship, he had not left the artist too much by himself, had not been able to spend time with him and talk to him as he would have liked to, absorbed as he was by the many obligations of his own work, that had him travel all over Europe.

They had met at Brugherio, nearly half a century ago, in 1953. Gianni had gone there to visit de Pisis, who was spending the last days of his life at the Villa Fiorita, and there he had met Bianco, who was a friend of de Pisis. Ever since then the industrialist's admiration for the young artist, whom de Pisis had pointed out and even nearly "entrusted" to him, would grow. An admiration, our impression is, less based on the full understanding of what Remo Bianco was doing (as singular, innovative and even eccentric as it was) than on the psychological charm the artist emanated.

In few words, it was something like a blank check: a total trust, renewed day after day, even when the artist's works and undertakings might have seemed remote from their shared sensitivities, even if this sensibility was that of a devotee of art.

This was an exceptional union, that would deserve to be better known, if the typically Lombard reluctance of the only surviving protagonist did not veil that knowledge, his purpose being, as he once said in a solemn, heartfelt statement, only "to bring fame to the artist. Who deserves it."

But now, without further preliminaries, let us get on to Bianco's research.

The Early Works

The first works we know by Remo Bianco go back to the early forties. In particular a self-portrait remains: a face with strongly-marked outlines, recalling Rouault's clowns.

This is no coincidence. In the Milanese circles right after the war, interest in Rouault, as was regard for Picasso, was widespread, and led to the publication of the first Italian monograph on the artist (Rouault, Edizioni Arte e Scienza, Milan 1945). Besides it was just around that time, or a few years before, that the French master had been given important marks of recognition: including the 1937 show at the Petit Palais in Paris and the one at the MoMA of New York in 1938, the publication of the one hundred prints of Passion (Vollard, 1939) and the monograph by Venturi (New York 1940).

So Bianco took his first steps in a pathos-filled mood of expressionism. And the choice of the theme too, midway between cheer and desperation, between game and tragedy, was indicative of the artist's psychology, and of his artistic theory. All of Bianco's art, so tinged by a playful dimension, was a game. But a game steeped in melancholy.

During those same years, on the other hand, Bianco also saw a great deal of de Pisis. He had known the Ferrara painter since the late thirties, and for him this meant not only meeting European culture, but also, more specifically, an art in which signs were predominant.

The work of de Pisis, actually, despite its classical structure, had splintered the drawing into myriads of
volatile, light segments that, actually, were not s very far from abstraction, nor from a certain Informal art, imposed on the sign. Bianco learned a great deal
from his swift, tense graphism, his anxious pointillism. And spending time with de Pisis also allowed him, in the post-war years, to be apart from th monolithic, opposed groups (on one side realism, o the other abstraction) in which Italian art was divide( Instead Bianco's work, after overcoming his fir: youthful successes, was turned towards an expression dominated by lightness, by levity. This can be seen also in a poem he wrote when he was twenty-two, and which is dated 1944: "Two butterflies / love each other in the sunlight / reminding me / of our human love."

That same year (which to tell the truth was hardly a inspiring one for lyricism, but Bianco lived in his own world, far from historical contingencies) we can read the following reflection in a notebook: "My heart light, like a swallow's wing. The soul is tired of being locked up and longs to fly."

So we see in the artist the aspiration towards immaterialness, absence of gravity: aspirations which soon will be translated into signs.

Another work of that period, to mention another example of the youthful period of which but few trace remain, is the Lavatore ammalato of 1947: a figure where the plastic organization is reduced and nearly dissolved in white and whitish tones, reminiscent of certain de Pisis interiors.

The Three-Dimensional Works. The 3Ds

The first turning point in the artist's work occurred around 1948: a turning point that indicates he ha reached a stylistic maturity, materialized in the 3D meaning three-dimensional works.

Having left behind the feeling, emotional painting his early days, Bianco turned towards an abstraction based on the different nature of materials.

The first idea of the three-dimensionals came 1948, even though most of the 3Ds can be dated (around 1950 and lasted throughout that decade. What Bianco sought was depth obtained not by volumes, but by surfaces, through a sum of layers. ; the artist placed various materials, which as of 19! included glass, plastics, wood, layered so as to for a play of ambiguities and transparencies.

As a matter of fact these essays (we are thinking especially of the cut and layered wood surfaces) car before Fontana's Teatrini. And, on the whole, w their alteration of the background of the work, they were a prelude to all the research on the manipulate of the canvas, on the pierced, extroverted, elaborated canvases that were undertaken at the end of 1 fifties by the artists gathered around Azimuth.

Obviously, the meaning and value of Bianco's work are not to be sought in the rights of anteriority it dogmatic sense. And besides, rights of anteriority are always relative: aside from dates, you would have observe the meaning (at times utterly different) given by the various artists to certain apparently similar operations. In our case, Bianco's assumptions were from those of Azimuth, so the comparison has a limited bearing, if any at all.

Having said this, we also ought to say that insufficient light has yet been cast on the role an artist like Bianco played on the Milanese scene, with his whimsical many-sidedness, his playfulness, his intense, visionary quality. A personality such as his, his very way of understanding art, surely left a less ephemeral mark than one might think.

But let us listen to the artist himself speak about his inventions: "The first time I collaborated with others, with other painters, with people that had nothing to do with painting, was for the 3Ds. This had begun in 1948 too. Then it grew in bits and pieces. In 1952 it developed more seriously with transparent material, sheets of glass or else plexiglass. On the other hand, the discovery of plexiglass was precisely the technical factor on which this research was based: there were 3 or 4 surfaces. I liked painting one and giving the other ones the opportunity to do other things and then blend them all, the result being an odd combination."

The 3Ds were presented in Milan, with the artist's other works, in a one-man show at the Galleria Montenapoleone in 1952, that was accompanied by a text by Lucio Fontana.

"Remo Bianco's recent experiments -Fontana wrote among other things-, aiming at seeking in a play of layers new aspects of `spatial painting,' particularly interest me by the value of certain indications. 'Dimensions' acquire `real' values that go beyond scenographic effects."

Thus Fontana understood Bianco's striving, his determination to overcome the picture to attain "reality": he grasped its theatrical, narrative aspects ("scenographic effects"), but its exceptional potentials as well, which even went beyond the results he had achieved.

But let us look at some of these 3Ds. Let us take for instance no. 5 (plate, p. 75 ). Bianco worked with irregular vertically opposed triangles, with diagonal rows, with cut-out shapes. In his composition there is a reminiscence of Licini's geometry (I am thinking of works like 11 Bilico), and there is a consonance with the formal research that the MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta), was performing in Milan at the time.

However Bianco's geometry was always playful and mocking. If in 1935 Licini had said: "We shall prove that geometry can become sentiment," Bianco, in the early fifties could paraphrase Licini's sentence and claim: "We shall prove that geometry can become irony." And actually, when you think of it, the rational forms of the 3D no. 5 (plate, p. 75) contain weirdly playful echoes and nostalgias of figurativeness: the lines seem to form figures of baseball bats, decorations of a gondola, billiard cues, starter pennants, small flower wreathes.

Or else, let us look at 3D no. 2 (plate, p. 47) Here too we are seemingly in terms of a rigorous abstraction. But actually those wavy forms remind us of bow ties, biscuits, gluten pasta for soup (as in certain advertisements of the times), or little butterflies. So Bianco's abstract work is full of echoes of reality: and they are playful, smiling echoes tending to desacralize the Pythagorean sacrality of geometry, and even rationality. In fact, for Bianco, geometry was an irrational, whimsical, heretic discipline.

Anyway, geometry was not the end, but the means of his pictures. Far from believing geometric language to be redeeming in itself (according to a then-widespread ideology), Bianco was already thinking about the possibility of going beyond the dimension of the picture. Layering, transparency, inserting different materials already threatened, even if still only embryonically, the nature and the identity of the canvas. Three-dimensionality therefore was a kind of prelude to his future installations, and the exit of the work from the rectangle of the frame.

As for how Bianco felt about geometry (means and not end, a linguistic instrument and not a stylistic absolute), it is no coincidence if, more or less during those very years in which he carried his three-dimensional inventions further, he also approached an instinctive informal art, that would seem to be the opposite of concretism.


	Remo Bianco. The Singularity of an Artist Elena Pontiggia A Question of Method The Early Works The Three-Dimensional Works. The 3Ds The Nuclears. The Spatials The Trip to America Imprint Art. Testmonies Collages The Tableaux dorés The Sixties. Investigation in Space The Seventies. Elementary Art "I am a lonely seeker" Remo Bianco A singular, undefinable artist, Remo Bianco created an eclectic work in the noblest sense of the word: a constantly heretic work (heretic even towards itself), that lies outside of categories and that, maybe for that very reason, was never thoroughly understood. Living in a state of perpetual expressive adolescence, repeating his ironic, Palazzeschi-style saying: "And let me have fun!," Bianco always considered art to be a game, with a playful freedom and a linguistic volubility streaked with conceptual dadaism. In other words, Bianco played with art, clearly knowing, as I have already written:' that all we can do is either play or be played. But beneath the surface of the game, an authentic, long-suffering existential concern surfaces in his work: an awareness of pain, of aggressivity, of injustice, a heart-breaking feeling of time going by and that we cannot stop. "I will go on travelling the world over and finding out that man is bad under every sun," he himself wrote.' And also: "I gave and was subjected to every violence." Bianco's entire poetic world is nothing but a long, unbroken autobiographical page: a page from a diary where the artist describes himself and his relationship with the world. Bianco worked all his life on what Proust called "the immense edifice of memory": he gathered, indexed, put together the traces and imprints of life. He was heedful of the smallest things, the most neglected, seeking to rescue them, to preserve them, to ennoble them by giving them an aesthetic statute. But he also lined up and mixed up, like a modern Bembo, an interminable bunch of tarots: silent tarots, nameless and faceless, as suits the sensibility of our times, that can no longer provide answers, only questions. And what are tarots? They are a game that represents the game of life, meaning the game Remo Bianco was the most interested in. His entire work, actually, projects a sense of effervescent, untiring creativity, that explores every artistic genre: painting, sculpture, installation, collage, performance, readymade. His work is a crucible of ideas, as well as a Chamber of Wonders, where objects and images of every shape and kind undergo metamorphoses, deformations, enchantments, experiencing sadisms and reliefs, cruelty and tenderness. So approaching the vast corpus of his work is like entering the magi's den: entering the concentric circles and the short circuits of a language that endlessly reinvented itself. And precisely by its overwhelming richness, for a long time it was eluded and misunderstood. Perhaps Bianco himself was aware of this when he wrote: "They never really took me seriously. I bombarded them with too many ideas, too many intuitions, too much disorder." A Question of Method It is not a simple matter to try to try to sort out Remo Bianco's vast, multi-faceted work. It is not simple for a number of reasons. The first and most important is intrinsic to the artist's artistic theory: a theory not only little prone to philology, but even to a defined, or definitive, division in periods. Remo Bianco's works were always in progress, in the course of becoming. Bianco proceeded by cycles of works that were not completed, but were re-thought and re-worked, sometimes years later. His creative urge, insensitive to the self-indulgence of formalism, yet in its own way never satisfied, expressed itself in results that overlapped and thronged like a river, chaotic, in waves, spurred by an emotional surging that was never disciplined nor could be disciplined. That gave rise to the artist's constant metamorphism. In a century like ours, that has made the stylistic mark the distinctive feature of art, often leading to a worn-out theory of repetition and variation, if not actual brands, Remo Bianco's work stands out from the others by its restless, fleeting physiognomy: a shifting physiognomy, typical of an artist who refused to give up any of the expressive paths he had undertaken, but instead held them all in hand, like the strings of a puppeteer. So it would be futile to try to analyze Bianco's corpus in terms of clearly defined expressive periods, even if there were certainly moments that featured more one or the other kind of investigation. If we add to this trait of Remo Bianco's work another equally significant one, meaning the artist's utter neglect of any kind of cataloguing, and the carelessness with which he signed or dated the work (the dates, when there are any, always have to be interpreted); if furthermore we realize how scarce the evidence (writings, catalogues, publications) that could provide stable points in the tangled skein of Bianco's production is, we understand that every date attributed to his works contains an element of critical randomness which will be difficult to eliminate. In this piece we shall therefore take into consideration this "original sin" (but might it not also be a virtue?) of Remo Bianco's research. We shall seek as much as possible to specify circumstances and chronology, also with the help of Lorella Giudici's catalogue: she carefully reconstructed, where information could be found, the exhibition history and the bibliography of the entire Gianni collection. But we shall not strive to entrench arbitrarily what arose like a fluid element, to block with a date that could just as well belong to a two-year or five-year period, or even a decade of work. Such an operation, seemingly philological, would actually be the opposite of philology. And to wind up these precisions, we should specify that we are referring here essentially to the works of Virgilio Gianni's collection, while situating them in Bianco's entire career. The Gianni collection, besides, offers a complete vision of the artist's work, as a result of a singular existential fact, connecting the Lombard industrialist with Remo Bianco. I have had the opportunity to meet, in the rather lengthy period of work related to this book, Virgilio Gianni. And I have rarely seen in a collector such an intense fondness for an artist (such an intense fondness as to be one-sided), as is his towards Remo Bianco. More than being in love with the works, as is usually the case with collectors, Gianni is in love with their author. And his love is a nearly paternal feeling, spurring him to seek the best way to make Bianco known, so as to spread and promote his work; a love that even today, after so many years, leads him to earnestly wonder whether perhaps, at the time of their friendship, he had not left the artist too much by himself, had not been able to spend time with him and talk to him as he would have liked to, absorbed as he was by the many obligations of his own work, that had him travel all over Europe. They had met at Brugherio, nearly half a century ago, in 1953. Gianni had gone there to visit de Pisis, who was spending the last days of his life at the Villa Fiorita, and there he had met Bianco, who was a friend of de Pisis. Ever since then the industrialist's admiration for the young artist, whom de Pisis had pointed out and even nearly "entrusted" to him, would grow. An admiration, our impression is, less based on the full understanding of what Remo Bianco was doing (as singular, innovative and even eccentric as it was) than on the psychological charm the artist emanated. In few words, it was something like a blank check: a total trust, renewed day after day, even when the artist's works and undertakings might have seemed remote from their shared sensitivities, even if this sensibility was that of a devotee of art. This was an exceptional union, that would deserve to be better known, if the typically Lombard reluctance of the only surviving protagonist did not veil that knowledge, his purpose being, as he once said in a solemn, heartfelt statement, only "to bring fame to the artist. Who deserves it." But now, without further preliminaries, let us get on to Bianco's research. The Early Works The first works we know by Remo Bianco go back to the early forties. In particular a self-portrait remains: a face with strongly-marked outlines, recalling Rouault's clowns. This is no coincidence. In the Milanese circles right after the war, interest in Rouault, as was regard for Picasso, was widespread, and led to the publication of the first Italian monograph on the artist (Rouault, Edizioni Arte e Scienza, Milan 1945). Besides it was just around that time, or a few years before, that the French master had been given important marks of recognition: including the 1937 show at the Petit Palais in Paris and the one at the MoMA of New York in 1938, the publication of the one hundred prints of Passion (Vollard, 1939) and the monograph by Venturi (New York 1940). So Bianco took his first steps in a pathos-filled mood of expressionism. And the choice of the theme too, midway between cheer and desperation, between game and tragedy, was indicative of the artist's psychology, and of his artistic theory. All of Bianco's art, so tinged by a playful dimension, was a game. But a game steeped in melancholy. During those same years, on the other hand, Bianco also saw a great deal of de Pisis. He had known the Ferrara painter since the late thirties, and for him this meant not only meeting European culture, but also, more specifically, an art in which signs were predominant. The work of de Pisis, actually, despite its classical structure, had splintered the drawing into myriads of volatile, light segments that, actually, were not s very far from abstraction, nor from a certain Informal art, imposed on the sign. Bianco learned a great deal from his swift, tense graphism, his anxious pointillism. And spending time with de Pisis also allowed him, in the post-war years, to be apart from th monolithic, opposed groups (on one side realism, o the other abstraction) in which Italian art was divide( Instead Bianco's work, after overcoming his fir: youthful successes, was turned towards an expression dominated by lightness, by levity. This can be seen also in a poem he wrote when he was twenty-two, and which is dated 1944: "Two butterflies / love each other in the sunlight / reminding me / of our human love." That same year (which to tell the truth was hardly a inspiring one for lyricism, but Bianco lived in his own world, far from historical contingencies) we can read the following reflection in a notebook: "My heart light, like a swallow's wing. The soul is tired of being locked up and longs to fly." So we see in the artist the aspiration towards immaterialness, absence of gravity: aspirations which soon will be translated into signs. Another work of that period, to mention another example of the youthful period of which but few trace remain, is the Lavatore ammalato of 1947: a figure where the plastic organization is reduced and nearly dissolved in white and whitish tones, reminiscent of certain de Pisis interiors. The Three-Dimensional Works. The 3Ds The first turning point in the artist's work occurred around 1948: a turning point that indicates he ha reached a stylistic maturity, materialized in the 3D meaning three-dimensional works. Having left behind the feeling, emotional painting his early days, Bianco turned towards an abstraction based on the different nature of materials. The first idea of the three-dimensionals came 1948, even though most of the 3Ds can be dated (around 1950 and lasted throughout that decade. What Bianco sought was depth obtained not by volumes, but by surfaces, through a sum of layers. ; the artist placed various materials, which as of 19! included glass, plastics, wood, layered so as to for a play of ambiguities and transparencies. As a matter of fact these essays (we are thinking especially of the cut and layered wood surfaces) car before Fontana's Teatrini. And, on the whole, w their alteration of the background of the work, they were a prelude to all the research on the manipulate of the canvas, on the pierced, extroverted, elaborated canvases that were undertaken at the end of 1 fifties by the artists gathered around Azimuth. Obviously, the meaning and value of Bianco's work are not to be sought in the rights of anteriority it dogmatic sense. And besides, rights of anteriority are always relative: aside from dates, you would have observe the meaning (at times utterly different) given by the various artists to certain apparently similar operations. In our case, Bianco's assumptions were from those of Azimuth, so the comparison has a limited bearing, if any at all. Having said this, we also ought to say that insufficient light has yet been cast on the role an artist like Bianco played on the Milanese scene, with his whimsical many-sidedness, his playfulness, his intense, visionary quality. A personality such as his, his very way of understanding art, surely left a less ephemeral mark than one might think. But let us listen to the artist himself speak about his inventions: "The first time I collaborated with others, with other painters, with people that had nothing to do with painting, was for the 3Ds. This had begun in 1948 too. Then it grew in bits and pieces. In 1952 it developed more seriously with transparent material, sheets of glass or else plexiglass. On the other hand, the discovery of plexiglass was precisely the technical factor on which this research was based: there were 3 or 4 surfaces. I liked painting one and giving the other ones the opportunity to do other things and then blend them all, the result being an odd combination." The 3Ds were presented in Milan, with the artist's other works, in a one-man show at the Galleria Montenapoleone in 1952, that was accompanied by a text by Lucio Fontana. "Remo Bianco's recent experiments -Fontana wrote among other things-, aiming at seeking in a play of layers new aspects of `spatial painting,' particularly interest me by the value of certain indications. 'Dimensions' acquire `real' values that go beyond scenographic effects." Thus Fontana understood Bianco's striving, his determination to overcome the picture to attain "reality": he grasped its theatrical, narrative aspects ("scenographic effects"), but its exceptional potentials as well, which even went beyond the results he had achieved. But let us look at some of these 3Ds. Let us take for instance no. 5 (plate, p. 75 ). Bianco worked with irregular vertically opposed triangles, with diagonal rows, with cut-out shapes. In his composition there is a reminiscence of Licini's geometry (I am thinking of works like 11 Bilico), and there is a consonance with the formal research that the MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta), was performing in Milan at the time. However Bianco's geometry was always playful and mocking. If in 1935 Licini had said: "We shall prove that geometry can become sentiment," Bianco, in the early fifties could paraphrase Licini's sentence and claim: "We shall prove that geometry can become irony." And actually, when you think of it, the rational forms of the 3D no. 5 (plate, p. 75) contain weirdly playful echoes and nostalgias of figurativeness: the lines seem to form figures of baseball bats, decorations of a gondola, billiard cues, starter pennants, small flower wreathes. Or else, let us look at 3D no. 2 (plate, p. 47) Here too we are seemingly in terms of a rigorous abstraction. But actually those wavy forms remind us of bow ties, biscuits, gluten pasta for soup (as in certain advertisements of the times), or little butterflies. So Bianco's abstract work is full of echoes of reality: and they are playful, smiling echoes tending to desacralize the Pythagorean sacrality of geometry, and even rationality. In fact, for Bianco, geometry was an irrational, whimsical, heretic discipline. Anyway, geometry was not the end, but the means of his pictures. Far from believing geometric language to be redeeming in itself (according to a then-widespread ideology), Bianco was already thinking about the possibility of going beyond the dimension of the picture. Layering, transparency, inserting different materials already threatened, even if still only embryonically, the nature and the identity of the canvas. Three-dimensionality therefore was a kind of prelude to his future installations, and the exit of the work from the rectangle of the frame. As for how Bianco felt about geometry (means and not end, a linguistic instrument and not a stylistic absolute), it is no coincidence if, more or less during those very years in which he carried his three-dimensional inventions further, he also approached an instinctive informal art, that would seem to be the opposite of concretism.
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