In the early 70's, Bianco's artistic activity turned towards a new sector of research. Fascinated by the world of science and technology, he sought a possible aesthetic dimension in chemical and physical procedures. In the laboratory of a Swedish chemical company Bianco discovered, in the combination of sephadex (a gel capable of dividing substances according to their specific weights) with other substances, some kinetic and chromatic properties (the latter obtained by means of aniline) which had the aesthetic effect of making the barrier between artistic activity and technological and scientific research increasingly flexible.

The search for the “sky in vitro”, as Bianco called the aesthetic values released by the chemical process of sephadex, followed the path of an ancient concept of alchemy, in which the “release of gold from base metal” becomes a metaphor for that process of learning that leads man to free himself of life's fundamental contradictions. Marcel Duchamp was a supporter of this concept and his language, in fact, is filled with symbols taken from alchemy: in the manifesto of the surrealist movement, Duchamp's command “melt the lead in your head and change it into surrealist gold” seems a paraphrase of the old injunction given to initiates of alchemy “turn yourselves from deadstones into living philosopher's stones”. We can find in Duchamp's works not only an iconographical correspondence with alchemic symbols, but also a strong aspiration to free ourselves from the “aesthetic conformity”, an aspiration which can be rightly identified with the alchemists' yearning for “golden comprehension”.

In these works, Bianco is driven by the same need for freedom from aesthetic conformity and as Duchamp raised “ready-made” to the dignity of works of art by simply choosing them, so did Bianco investigate the world of technology and science and transform an ordinary object into a work of art by “wisely” recognizing and designating with a seal or monogram the beauty which surrounds us in everyday objects. This characterizes not only this phase but all of Bianco's production, based on rejection of the traditional concept of work of art and the consistent support of an “aesthetic approach” to life. But unlike Duchamp, who by choosing the “ready-made” presented a “visual indifference to the complete absence of good or bad taste”, we find in Bianco's works a kind of “aesthetic delight”, a projection of imaginary ghosts evoked by the memories of his existential journey. As a consequence of these experiences, Bianco later experimented with smoke, air and fire, but the ultimate result of such a research approach was his “therapeutic booths” his “talking paintings” and his “living cemetery”. The idea of “compensatory of psychotherapeutic” art led to the creation of a series of booths where the spectators were given a chance to shed their obsessions by listening to tape-recordings which truly liberated them from particular psychological states.

The “talking paintings” of 1972-74 were a series of white or black canvases that transmitted recorded autobiographies of ordinary people “We usually see a painting with our eyes but we can also see it with our ears, equally brief and immediate, but with the advantage of greater creative possibilities”, Bianco wrote in the presentation of these works at an exhibition in 1976; this was the first key to the interpretation of these paintings, where the possibilities of communication are increased by stimulating a greater number of modes of perception.

But the spectator is asked to establish a more “intimate” relationship with the protagonist of the recorded autobiographical testimony. The painting not only stimulates our perception but also evokes new sensations in which the presence of the human voice affirms the utopia of an everlasting presence which seems to challenge space, time and death itself. Linked to the idea of an autobiography conceived as a fount of truth and experience taken from death and given back to life, is Bianco's project of a living cemetery, carried out in the mid-70's.

During this second phase of research, starting in the aseptic rooms of Swedish laboratories and terminating in the temptations of dialogue with death in the living cemetery, the leitmotiv seems to be, on the one hand, the freeing of all the body's sensorial possibilities, thanks to the most advanced technology, and on the other the penetration into ritual paths where, as Tadeusz Cantor said in The Theatre Of Death (1975): “Only the dead become perceptible (to the living), thus acquiring at such a high price their separate condition, their distinction and their dazzling, almost clown-like form”

(G. Belli, A. Marchionne, Remo Bianco, ed. Puntoelinea, Milano, 1987)