Around 1948 Bianco began his first works in the relief-image cycle. These were primarily plaster or plastic bas-reliefs made by forming the surface over objets trouvés, reproducing their shapes.

The choice of the objects destined to leave their relief-image was not the least bit random but supposed a necessary relationship with the artist's existential experience: “everything that has come into contact with me” wrote Bianco, in fact, in his man ifesto of 1956. The relief-image – the author goes on to explain in his manifesto – is the response to a need to “reappropriate” reality through its “double”: the object’s relief-image thus serves to produce “another” reality, where the objects themselves, as Miklos Varga observes, take on the “significance of a liberating metaphor”.

The leitmotiv of all relief-image art seems to be the need to overcome the contradictory relationship between man and the dynamics of social “development”, imposed by a reality which “continually surrounds us with new things”: for Remo Bianco, this quest to overcome, takes on the form of fixing the objects in time and space; the artist “revisits” them, endowing them with symbolic values, in which the recovery of scraps of memory takes on the form of “imbalming” fragments of existential experience. From the earliest attempts, aesthetic experience was then contrasted with existential experience, which was to lead Bianco to develop the poetry of relief-image art into his so-called “living relief-images” in 1964.

In this manifesto of 1956, Bianco had already sensed man's need to be himself the relief-image of social reality; the development of this idea led him to enlarge the reality to be attempted, also involving man in this second phase. Thus there was a shift from the fixity of inanimate objects to the “action” of living mannequins, placed in “display windows”, transparent planes for disconcerting stagesettings.

A series of assemblages belong to the same period; here the process of appropriating reality, thrown off the path of practical living, is presented as a sort of ritual, able to draw the object into the sphere of art: the elements borrowed from reality are divided, catalogued, wrapped, packaged in plastic bags which “hide” and “conceal” the objects, which are then introduced and assimilated into the formal scheme of the picture, where they retain their independent structure provided by the rhythms of the container arrangement. These works are interesting primarily because of the wrapping and packaging operation which, unlike Dadaism, is something more than a simple provocatory presence of objects: it is “research” and “activity” in relation to an object. The wrapping function, in fact, implies a need to ammass, isolate, conserve, transfer, with a taste for the unknown and secret, which in its repetition creates a sort of obsessive rite.

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