"An incorrigible Peter Pan," as Pierre Restany, who greatly admired him, once fondly called him, in his own way Remo Bianco did not want to grow up, preferring to go on living in his own fairy-tale world, which he would leave only briefly, if repeatedly, to wander freely through its Never-Never-Never-Land or its Kensington gardens. He even ran into his Captain Hook, in fact more than once, and only by sheer luck did not lose, indeed he did not, his shadow.

As a result, he met with scarce success with the "insiders," critics, dealers, gallery owners, collectors, both before and after his death ten years ago. As a matter of fact it is quite a challenge to try to fit the artist's forty years' many-sided activity into some clearly defined, although volatile, "style," despite the ambiguity and the inconsistency of such a parameter, today so thoroughly abused as to have become callously exploited (and voided) by the "jungle of commercial advertising, which attributes `style' even to gasoline or toilet paper, or the [stylists'] world of fashion, where the yearly changes are also presented as being new `styles,"' to use the effective terms of a scholar like George Kubler. He went on to convincingly claim that such a category "whose countless shades of meaning seem to embrace all of experience, ... describes a specific figure in space rather than a type of existence in time,"' since, as Kubler specifies, quoting Shapiro, "A theory of style encompassing psychological and historical issues has not yet been expressed."' And in fact only such a theory might well suit Bianco's work, and contribute to its explanation, or at least help dispel a priori conclusions otherwise difficult to outweigh.

The key to Remo's very unique consistency (because our artist's work certainly had a coherency, not abstract, and far from unrecognizable, if we're looking in the right direction) does not belong to a formal order, related to a reductive acceptation of a project. That fact becomes obvious as soon as, ignoring theoretic-ideological filters, we turn to his concrete products, to his paintings, his sculptures, his actions. Besides, they are elucidated by Bianco's statements, which accordingly do not have the inflexibility of an organized artistic theory, and just like the works, reflect a diffuse existential flow, ever open to experience, and thus never preconceived, vivified by curiosity, the pleasure of experimenting, doing, finding, beyond disciplinary boundries.

The reader can find evidence of this attitude of Bianco's in more than one public statement, in manifests, exhibition catalogues and various writings, and more broadly in the recent outstanding book, unfortunately a non-commercial publication, by Angelo Franceschetti, which presents long extracts from the recording of an interview of the artist by Flavio Angeli, planned and reviewed by Remo. He had been feeling for some time the need to explain the conceptions, methods and aims of his work, which was so disturbing to many. It is a clarifying contribution that should not be neglected. And to which we shall refer, simply quoting here several extracts meaningful, but no moreso than any of the others.

"The basis of my work-Bianco claimed first of all, giving the key to the reason of this need to 'explain himself', as well as the motor of his making-is in ideas, in a lot of ideas, of aesthetic intuitions which, if they are not documented, lose their importance and their actuality." "My working method is entirely free," he went on to say, aware of the effects of such an attitude, which came to him naturally. In a time where in art "nothing is shunned," "that which is not tolerated in an artist is discontinuity, and too much freedom, and not accepting vital rules. In my opinion [instead], that is the very position an artist must adopt to be free once again, to be in opposition once again with the way of thinking and the aesthetic order of society which stands for the knowledge and aesthetic common sense of another era. ...Today, the point is not to change painting, but to change behavior, the revolution is in the artist's behavior, so an artist refuses a position in society and is automatically in a revolutionary, critical position. The condition for recovering a ferment or a creative possibility, if there is such a thing, probably lies in that situation. For me that freedom was essential."

Hence, also, Bianco's eclecticism, which the artist acknowledged as being for him an inevitable condition, and the source of many misunderstandings and rejections on behalf of the critics and the market. This was expressed in the variety and the misinterpretations of aims and results and in the very simultaneous, grueling fact of practicing more than one, and different, lines of work and research: "When I go over to my work table, at that moment I do not know what I shall work on. ... At that moment I don't know, and I am precisely a slave to that emotion [...] and I shall do what I have felt with the greatest intensity. But this constant splitting causes pain, anxiety; I am not happy while I'm working, not in the least happy. Every time I thought I might solve this problem by devoting myself to a period of my research so as to completely conclude it, I always failed. A lot of ideas come back to my mind and besiege me with the violence and the vitality of physical presences, forcing me to endure this onslaught of reminiscences. I am really powerless in front of these inspirations, so to say, and solicitations, and I cannot follow a precise sequence," "Not only do I not have just one research (I have many); but there are also emotions, contradictions, indispositions that make my work an authentic torture. ...I don't know, I wouldn't be able to say exactly whether I have a method, maybe I have several. ... Everything I see is a constant reference, is a constant working in a certain sense. This may seem a dispersion, maybe it is an enrichment, but what is certain is that it is deeply exhausting and trying"; "Amidst this continual storm of ideas and emotions I seek to straighten out this small boat and I strive to keep it afloat, to hold my own and recover something concrete." And again: "What happens to me is that I cannot thoroughly exhaust a period. I am seeking in one field and I get interested in another and then I interrupt the one and begin the other and then years later I come back to it. ... Obviously I never can say `I'm working on this,' yes, I'm working on this too, but in the meantime inside me there are still echoes of other moments, of other periods that I have to constantly pursue. ... It's actually necessary for me, for my way of working. This is very arduous and entails huge problems." And he concludes, with a clear-headed self-criticism: "I wouldn't like ... to never complete anything because of having sought too much, that is the danger. More than the danger, I would say, my disposition, my character, my temperament."

As we can see, in Bianco the connection between the artistic and the existential, between making, making art, and simply living, was a very close one. That also explains how he could have been attuned, since the early fifties, to the still-underground movement which, owing its origins to the Informal and to Action Painting, was to bring about radical changes in Western art, beyond the traditional genres, beyond painting and sculpture, through exchanges, shiftings, statutary refoundations. Bianco was undoubtedly one of the pioneers, or rather precursors, of it all, well before the conditions between the late-fifties and early-sixties when these premises would come to fruition, in the USA with Happenings and therefore Pop and Op Art, in Europe with the action of the groups of visual, kinetic research, sharing the program (including the French GRAV and the German Zero, the Italian N and T, the Dutch Nun and the object proposals of the Nouveau Réalisme. Remo's forays beyond painting and sculpture occurred more or less at the same time as, or even before, the American New Dada and the first ventures of an Yves Klein, with whom by the way our artist at the time had not directly anything to do. His first formative environment was entirely Italian, or rather Milanese, with the determining influence of de Pisis first and then of Fontana.

With the Ferrara master, he had a long, fruitful relationship,' not to speak of the direct debts, obvious in the figurative paintings executed up to right after the Second World War, where we can find the same synthetic, immediate sign as in de Pisis, and even the same cursive, slanting way of signing the picture. To him the young painter owed the seeds of his passion for art, his exclusive dedication to it, as well as the bliss, and the passion, of making, of course transposed onto other, novel, registers, but equally shared and vital. Whereas Fontana, certainly before any other and moreso, opened up to him the horizons of non-representative art, confronting him with a material which insofar as it was a material became, or could become, painting, within a new spatiality, alien to the constructive mechanisms of perspective, capable, beyond any mimetic implication and within the material itself, of actively involving the viewer.

It was precisely within such a combination of circumstances that, as of 1948, Remo's new artistic experiments took place, beginning with the 3D series, soon enriched by the spatial, or informal, paintings. As a matter of fact, both were characterized and ruled by an open, virtually dynamic spatiality. It was no mere coincidence if, when the 3D compositions were first presented to the public, in 1953, at the Galleria Montenapoleone of Milan, Fontana wrote a short essay, which is worthwhile quoting, because of the importance of the testimony and the outspoken sharing of what the artist was doing: "Remo Bianco's new experiments, aiming, through an interplay of planes, towards new aspects of `spatial painting' particularly interest me for the import of certain indications. The `dimensions' assume `real' values that go beyond scenic effects: depth leads up to the first steps of three-dimensional research. Young painters today, increasingly breaking away from the grammatical, stylistic rules containing painting and sculpture within a rigid academism, take part in the ferment of our times with new enquiries, stimulated by the outstanding conquests of modern science."

The three-dimensionality of those works (3D stands for three-dimensional) was not an illusion, as it was on the other hand, constitutionally, in painting. It was not Alberti's "prospective window," but "real dimensions" as Fontana wrote, that were feasible from the point of view of perspective. And the "scenic effects" Fontana also mentioned were produced by the layering of transparent elements, in wood or plastic material (the small catalogue of the Milanese show showed an esquisse of one beside Fontana's essay), offering the experience of an articulated, potentially mobile, space. A spatial framework that Bianco used to suggest a dialectic between a real foreground with openings that varied in size and number, in form and color, and a background, the whole being chromatically diversified. Surprisingly, the result preceded his spatial master's Teatrini, which came several years later, and virtually the many, and diversely formulated and resolved, "machinette (small machines)" stemming from the visual and kinetic experiments of the above-mentioned groups. His work on surface, in its connections with its support and the space inside and outside would lead to precise confirmations and developments, again around 1959-60, among the authors gravitating around Azimuth, beginning with artists like Castellani and Bonalumi. And not just among them, but also, later on, among the French of Support-Surface, yet in a more analytical and systematic spirit, as in the case of the Milanese we just mentioned.