Remo Bianco's art - The tableaux dorés

In 1955, in the United States, Remo Bianco met Jackson Pollock and thus came into direct contact with American “action painting”. This encounter initiated the phase of Bianco's “gestural” canvases, done with the technique of dripping (the colour, in fact, was made to drip directly on to the canvas). Alter this first phase, Bianco went on to cut the canvas into small squares and recomposed them on a new support according to an arhythmic division of the surface.

These first experiments led the way to the tableaux dorés, where not only was the arhythmic division of the surface replaced with a geometric spatial arrangement but the dripping process was also replaced by a collage of gold or silver leaf on a background treated with oil or enamel. The tableaux dorés, shown for the first time with great success in Milan in 1957, represent the most truly pictorial moment in his vast production.

For an artist devoted to experimentalism like Remo Bianco, the constant presence of these tableaux in his production – beginning in '57 – also destined for continuous reuse in both the appropriations cycle and the missed opportunities and joy of living cycle, seems to reflect not only the author's need to attribute an easily-recognizable personal trademark (“even art needs its flag”, wrote Bianco in '77) but also a sort of “pictorial compromise” wherein the ideological-cultural aspirations which support his entire production are pacified within the bounds of traditional painting materials.

From a closer look, in fact, the operation of rational space measurement which creates the “checkered grill” of the tableaux seems to descend directly from the classical concept of armonia mundi, while the tesseras assembled by collage, though subject to the rhythm of this architectural structure, are products of an opposing concept which descends from the first phase of the autonomous and uncontrolled action of dripping until it crystalizes into these corroded, shriveled elements, glittering just enough to produce perspective depth, in a sort of pictorial neoromanticism.

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


	The tableaux dorés go to a page with thumbnails of the tableaux dorés In 1955, in the United States, Remo Bianco met Jackson Pollock and thus came into direct contact with American “action painting”. This encounter initiated the phase of Bianco's “gestural” canvases, done with the technique of dripping (the colour, in fact, was made to drip directly on to the canvas). Alter this first phase, Bianco went on to cut the canvas into small squares and recomposed them on a new support according to an arhythmic division of the surface. These first experiments led the way to the tableaux dorés, where not only was the arhythmic division of the surface replaced with a geometric spatial arrangement but the dripping process was also replaced by a collage of gold or silver leaf on a background treated with oil or enamel. The tableaux dorés, shown for the first time with great success in Milan in 1957, represent the most truly pictorial moment in his vast production. For an artist devoted to experimentalism like Remo Bianco, the constant presence of these tableaux in his production – beginning in '57 – also destined for continuous reuse in both the appropriations cycle and the missed opportunities and joy of living cycle, seems to reflect not only the author's need to attribute an easily-recognizable personal trademark (“even art needs its flag”, wrote Bianco in '77) but also a sort of “pictorial compromise” wherein the ideological-cultural aspirations which support his entire production are pacified within the bounds of traditional painting materials. From a closer look, in fact, the operation of rational space measurement which creates the “checkered grill” of the tableaux seems to descend directly from the classical concept of armonia mundi, while the tesseras assembled by collage, though subject to the rhythm of this architectural structure, are products of an opposing concept which descends from the first phase of the autonomous and uncontrolled action of dripping until it crystalizes into these corroded, shriveled elements, glittering just enough to produce perspective depth, in a sort of pictorial neoromanticism. (G. Belli, A. Marchionne, Remo Bianco, ed. Puntoelinea, Milano, 1987)