The possibilities Bianco achieved in the 3Ds were then carried even further, in pictorial interventions of an informal-spatialist spirit on surfaces, the very same spirit the artist used with more traditional supports, in this case single, such as canvas, boards, cardboard or others. The images of the various diaphragms thus added up, always dynamically, thanks to the inevitable displacement of the viewer, forming a kaleidoscopic picture in motion, variable, and charged with anticipations too, and beyond these, full of suggestiveness. Furthermore, as Adriano AItamira-a companion of Remo's for decades, a critically attentive witness, and the author, in my opinion, of the most discerning pages on his great, ill-known friend, and who, rara avis, proclaimed his genial role as precursor-, observed: "the powerful idea that came out of that experiment of Bianco's was that he was already actually expressing himself in terms of a meta-language, nearly as a kind of commentary on the abstract art of those years. All of Bianco's important work in the following years stemmed from that attitude, and its direct consequences. And it is precisely that critical attitude that led to one of the most interesting and successful experiments of Remo Bianco's career: that of the Collages."' In these, at least at the start (because the artist, just like with the other series of his works, would go on doing them the rest of his life, causing among other things-and this is not a minor problem-confusions and mistakes as regards a correct chronology, which is often uncertain or at fault) in these, as I was saying, Bianco reached an unusual, and certainly not unmotivated, solution: he took one of his paintings, cut it up into regular, small rectangles or squares, and thus built a new painting by glueing these details side by side. That was in 1955-56, when Remo came back from a stay in New York, where he had been in touch with the artists of American Action Painting, and especially with Jackson Pollock. They influenced him, bringing about the shift from informal-spatial painting to gestual-sign painting (to which it would reasonably appear Bianco devoted himself from then on, despite the improbable present-day dating of several paintings which refer to previous years), soon (or else right away: perhaps gestual-sign paintings and mosaic-like collages with pieces of them came at the same time, or nearly so). This in turn became the object of new, different operations, precisely of the order of meta-language, to resort to Altamira's stimulating reasoning. According to him, Bianco's trip to New York had been a fundamental experience, not just because of the capital encounter with Pollock's work (which, I may add, Remo could have seen in Italy, as of 1948 in Venice, at the Biennale, where his works were shown among those of Peggy Guggenheim's collection; and then again at the Venice Biennale, in July 1950, in the United States pavilion, and in October of the same year in a one-man show in Milan in the Galleria del Naviglio), but also because "perhaps" it showed him "the uselessness and the impossibility of profitably following such a thoroughly worn path. The triggering, the truly genial discovery actually came about when Remo, contradicting the linear ductus, the dripping of colors creating ramifications of signs on the canvas, had the idea of cutting his informal pictures into pieces, dismounting them and remounting them like garbled puzzles, precisely contradicting the temporal logic of swift, immediate paintings, closely bound to impulse and gesture, in order to recover them in small precious tesserae that had to be remounted like mosaics, using a time-consuming, patient technique."

And Altamira adds that with these works "Remo Bianco, besides announcing the death of the informal, right after the mid-fifties, invented his checkerboard design which was to remain the lasting pattern of nearly all his important pictorial production of the coming years: the Tableaux dorés and the Sacchettini. It is no coincidence if such a pattern can be entirely resumed in a conceptual formula that is echoed for instance, although with even more lucidity, in the work of Piero Manzoni."' On the other hand-again Altamira-"if the 3Ds and the Collages represent a kind of reaction against the abstract painting of the fifties, practically a painting used in the margins of painting, like a commentary or an ulterior hypothesis about the creativity of a possible future, Remo Bianco was also looking for solutions that would somehow lead him outside the territory of painting."" Outside and beyond, in a territory that was to become very crowded in the next decades, which once again Bianco explored as a pioneer.

And now we come to the Impronte, performed since the early fifties (but here also dates should be checked), and certainly documented after the middle of that decade, astonishing precursors of certain new-realist operations. But furthermore they demonstrated Bianco's attitude of absorbing all things into his creativity, which was his main feature: an overflowing attitude, intolerant of any limit, omnivorous, because it was the expression and the satisfaction of a primary, innate urge to appropriate life. So relentless as to prevent the artist from having a reasoned, and even scheduled, working progression which would have contributed to his public success. But it was also the irresistible background of the totalizing appropriation announced in his prophetic (as regards Bianco's future career) 1956 Manifesto dell'arte improntale, wherein Bianco claimed that "The art of the future is placed under the sign of the IMPRINT," that "an IMPRINT is everything that remains impressed upon our subconscious, IMPRINT of society itself, insofar as it is an image of all those conditionings that the essence of life contains today," going on to say that was why "man cannot avoid being the imprint of a society that changes continually and constantly surrounds us with new things." Therefore, "to get away from certain phenomena that are not always desirable, man will have to master them, creating an imprint that will no longer be the object, but something in conformity with his own nature. All this requires a different type of expression taking into consideration all these assumptions." And he ended by announcing: "My imprints are a universal documentation that will catalogue all the things that came in touch with me through a re-dimensioned reality of the present day truth. I claim that in the near future men will make imprints in order to possess themselves of the reality surrounding them."

These claims are full of magic-primordial echoes, including even apotropaic elements, clearly of great interest, also because of their atypical character in Italian art, but not just Italian, of the times, aside from a certain preconceptual vein, once again recurrent in Remo Bianco. Then there remains the fact that this aspiration-tension towards a global appropriation of all that is "other than self," animate or inanimate, expressed itself with an extraordinary inventive energy, especially after the mid-sixties, often in playful tones, derived from Dadaism (but at the time widespread even in contexts one would not have imagined at first, such as in the Parisian GRAV or the Milanese Miriorama, or even in an artist like Piero Manzoni) and from a conceptualizing frame of mind. Both of these strains could be found in the researches of the previous decade which besides, as we know, were not entirely discontinued. On the contrary they were expanded, as were even moreso the imprints, which shifted from objects to people (the Impronte viventi presented in 1964 at the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice) and the Tableaux dorés, which were not only repeated and diversely re-interpreted, but became instruments of appropriation of different things and situations. Their gold-with obvious alchemical attributes-even became the trademark of Bianco's appropriation of the whole, and therefore of his wide-spread omnipresence. Along with some more familiar and frequent actions, we now have, for instance, the Trafitture (Piercings), which are also Appropriazioni, such as those achieved by spraying artificial snow (the Sculture neve - Snow Sculptures), with heat or, the opposite, with cold (precisely the Sculture fredde and calde - Cold and Hot Sculptures). Everything bears the mark of appropriation, including the interventions called Sovrastrutture, Appropriazioni and Azioni perdute, connected-as the author writes-by the will "to insert my artistic theme where life and reality refuse it, reminding everyone that art needs its own flag." Following a progression that could but lead Bianco towards the fields of technology and science: in the Quadri parlanti (Talking Paintings) and the Cimiteri viventi (Live Cemeteries), since the early seventies, as regards technology; and for science in the Garitte psicoterapiche (Psychotherapeutic Sentryboxes), after the mid-sixties, wherein the visitor would receive a recorded psycho-therapeutic message, and his experiments on the filter and the subdivision of colors by means of a chemical called Sephadex.

Obviously all this verges on the autobiographical. Or rather, at least not rarely, coincides with it. Exactly as Bianco actually would repeat in a work shown at the Museo delle Albere of Trento in 1983, which featured showcases presenting personal objects (among others, dolls, abacuses, a glove, an artifical snow spray-can) alongside the printed reproduction of his Manifesto dell'arte autobiografica, dated 1970, like all the other very clarifying writings of the same order." You could read this statement: "Throughout the history of figurative art the artist has always sought a theme or an aspect of life, to be able to be inspired by 'mythology,' the realism of nature, patriotism, etc. Including nature and literary reflection, the microscopic (to seek in depth, meaning under the skin, new images). My own research is above all based on autobiographical aspects. Every man is a great artist and does not know it. All he would need to do would be to tell his own life, with sincerity and courage. Sometimes going into someone's house I see ugly paintings on the walls, `kitsch' objects. A cultural wasteland. Instead how interesting an autobiographical documentation would be, sincere, daring, intimate, erotic with a profound analysis of `self' and life: documents and mementos."

There are two persons, without whom Remo Bianco would not have been what he was, who would certainly have deserved to figure in such an Arte Autobiografica. First of all, Filippo de Pisis, whom we already mentioned. About the second, Doctor Virgilio Gianni, despite his discretion, his desire not to appear, at least a few words should be said, also because of this occasion. Because in fact this book is the catalogue of Bianco's works that he owns, purchased with a systematic assiduousness, out of his interest, over decades, for the painter and his work. Indeed, ever since 1953, the Milanese businessman, an authentic patron of our times, followed the fortunes of his favorite artist (he was not the only one, but the most heartfelt and admired). That year he had gone to Brugherio, the nursing home where de Pisis was staying, the now-famous Villa Fiorita, so as to show the master a small painting of his. There he met for the first time Remo, whom from then on he would defend and support in all ways, and not just by becoming his most important and devoted collector While on this subject, although I realize I may offend Doctor Gianni's modesty (after all, we are talking about ... autobiographical art, and to all effects he was one of the artist's appropriations, so therefore should be at least mentioned, if not `indexed' in this catalogue), I would like to take the liberty to recall two episodes, among the many, that might allow to measure the significance and the quality of his generous and intelligent interest in Bianco. First of all, he was the one who enabled the young painter to go to New York and stay there-so essential, as we already said-in 1955. And again he was the one who introduced Remo to Sephadex, presented in the pavilion of his company in the 1960 Milan Fair, and that would trigger the artist's research in chemistry which, owing to the limits of this essay, we simply mentioned, but which was of great relevance, as we are all aware.