Sergio Romiti - Catalogo ragionato dei dipinti - 2019

Sergio Romiti. Catalogo ragionato dei dipinti di Sergio Romiti (Bologna, 1928-2000). 2 volumes totaling 992 pages, presents the artist’s entire archived production (1,640 paintings reproduced in black and white and 137 color works). Editorial case. In excellent condition - marginal folds on the dust jacket. Auction without reserve!!!!

Sergio Romiti (Bologna, April 14, 1928 – Bologna, March 12, 2000) was an Italian painter. He never joined any group. He began painting in 1946. From 1947 he actively participated in the artistic life. Montale called him “recognizable among a thousand.”

Biography

The same subject in detail: Socialist Realism.
Already in 1946, he devoted himself to painting. His entry into artistic life dates to 1947, while his definitive artistic baptism was in 1948 when he exhibited at the First National Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Bologna. An important show because it brought together all the artists of the middle generation (Birolli, Guttuso, Cassinari, Corpora, Afro, Santomaso, Vedova, Mirko, Fazzini, Minguzzi) and even more because it served as a pretext for a loud confrontation by Togliatti against modern art as a kind of art that did not correspond to the socialist realist ideal. After that crushing denunciation the artists split: those who wanted to save what could be saved—like Guttuso—and those who wanted to claim the right, as the Forma Group, to be in the party but express themselves in a new way. Romiti did not take a position, having neither realist nor abstract pretensions, nor being a party member. The following year he exhibited at the Galleria del Secolo in Rome with Vacchi and Barnabè. In 1954 he won a prize purchase at the second edition of the Spoleto Prize.

He remained in the limelight of the Italian art scene and in 1960 obtained a solo room at the Venice Biennale. After the 60s he would push his artistic course to extreme consequences. Having never left his native city except briefly and after living a withdrawn and solitary life, he decided to end his life on March 12, 2000.

The Bologna of Sergio Romiti
Poetics
Starting from a highly personal neo-Cubism (early 1950s), Romiti absorbs the expressive and poetic code of his fellow citizen Giorgio Morandi. In 1954 on the Paragone magazine, the art critic Arcangeli included him—improperly—among the Last Naturalists. A painter difficult to interpret, he can be placed halfway between Morandi and Informalism or—as he liked to repeat—halfway between Morandi and Paco Rabanne. In fact, his art uses the metaphor of the object as a pretext: the observed object is reproduced in the works filtered by a mental dimension that prevails over what is considered the starting point. The reproduced object is like a distillate presented with an acidic perfume, which synesthetically conveys the dissolving attack perpetrated on the object. This attack would prove systematic starting from 1955. Before that date the mental and structural scanning of his works was very strong. Subsequently, the structure is lost, the distinction between object and background begins to blur, the objec­tive carcass broadens and distills. Subtraction, beyond the object, begins to concern colors as well: from the reds of butcher shops in 1948-1949, to the blues and greens of kitchens with shelves, tables and later ironing rooms, leading in 1960 to black and white, a coherently pursued choice until 1965, the year in which the color swaths, the fields, are practically black and the sparse splotches of light—a dull, soft gray—interrupt the tunnel into which the artist has irreversibly entered. Now the object is reabsorbed by the background, the object has become emptiness, the soft brushstrokes bear a low pH. It is the path that, at the same time, Ungaretti and Montale were pursuing in literary matters, the latter a writer who would define Romiti’s painting as recognizable among a thousand. It is now time for the artist to stop painting, perhaps because he felt he had approached the zero degree of his poetic path. But, unable to stay away from painting, he returns to it on tiptoe hoping to continue on tracks already apparently interrupted in 1965. The important 1976 retrospective of the Vostro in Bologna curated by Maurizio Calvesi is to be noted. After that date, frustrated by the lack of understanding of his late works, a bitter emotional storm strikes him and ends intentionally in 2000 with his life. In 2006 the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna organized a retrospective about him, also proposing unpublished works. In 2008 the 80th anniversary of the artist’s birth was celebrated.

A later reading. Since the 1960s, Sergio Romiti sought to regain space in painting that he felt compromised by the “perdre pied” (as critic Tapié defined it) of the dominant art of the time: Informel. He gradually arrived at a more imposing “gravitas,” while never neglecting in form that “lightness”—and even that “insecurity”—that had been congenial to him. The paintings of the early 60s (of course, the last century) mostly display a soft gray color, with touches of black or red. The declared opposition to Informal art nonetheless subjected him to accusations by some critics of being “against modernity.” Over the decade, a crueller stroke becomes more evident in his painting (which had preserved, so to speak, a “humility of doing” even in fidelity to traditional painting tools, and even in small or medium formats) indicating a tendency to “limit” the Informal without embracing Figurative or a compositional structure where form appears almost geometrically superimposed on the painting’s surface: form remains intrinsic and necessary to the “heart” of the compositions themselves, from which one can perceive the “brakes” (and the “accelerations,” and the “screeches”: the “dynamism,” in short) to which the artist had alluded in relation to these works, which were labeled “black” for the dominant color. The particular stratifications and dissolves, the sudden ignitions, or the darkness of this painting could also indicate the complex movements of the psyche, with the translation of inner activity given the name of “stream of consciousness.” But, taking into account his admissions on the subject, Romiti then intended mainly to assault that “ash” in which life loses its peculiarity and risks becoming, indeed, only powder, or dissolution, or ash, not sufficiently compacted by the critical/formal intervention of the artist, before that final collapse that is death, i.e., before the executants (as fully as possible carried out) of the talent each is given at birth. And yet, the “dynamism” of his paintings always appears as the other face of an attraction that, like the almost opposite toward Informalism, can act destructively on life: it can act at least as a different “dissacratory experimentation.” In fact, if one or the other impulse (the more vital one of movement, or the static one of ash) becomes excessive, “out of measure,” or if it makes the lone voice, the orphan voice, of the present prevail over any other voice: then the decline of the current historical period, lamented by many scholars, will prevail. In Romiti however there remains the need, debated and vital, to rediscover the objects of “reality” (already “lost” in the most ordinary and recognizable forms) anew “sensitive to his gaze.” But in these years, only shadow and light seem to have taken their place. Throughout the 70s, his oils tend toward an “absolutization of the present,” with all that this implies. In the last two decades we then face an anguished situation of his existence, alternating between light and darkness, which the paintings reveal, still revealing themselves, but less attracted (as in the previous decade) by a life idea, so to speak, one, more radically “subversive.” There is still the “odyssey of the object,” and there is—sometimes exaggerated—the “movement” (with the “pride of assuming it”). There is, however, alongside occasional excesses of emotivity or less “lucidity,” a pronounced appeal to a metaphysical horizon. Indeed, with the rediscovery of a “happiness of painting,” where the present—never inescapable—must become the workshop of other times of our living, the dimension of Being has become more pregnantly present alongside the dimension that, by opposition, could be called becoming. This dimension becomes more visible in the last acrylics, precisely due to the painter’s longing to recover, in the greatest possible wholeness, “the whole reality”: underground—and more humble and childish fantasies, and beliefs in the transcendent, and still “movement” and immanence—including all.

Sources: The critic Giovanni Maria Accame recently presented some of Sergio Romiti’s works at the Circolo Artistico di Bologna on the tenth anniversary of his death. The text of the presentation is included on a CD at the Circolo Gallery.

From the text by G. M. Accame “The threatened balance”: “Sergio Romiti and the image of the future,” by G. G. R.

To this day, they are still in a phase so to speak auroral and dilettantish in the use of the written word. For this I have great scruple in calling myself a “poet” who would join his words to the paintings of the husband Sergio Romiti. And yet I am compelled to do so—though with few examples of what I have written, exposing myself to accusations of vanity, or worse—especially for what has proven, in our years together, a fundamental and unusual experience of “relation.” Nor do I desist from pushing myself for this purpose beyond what is surely central (the 1960s/70s) of the “fragments of thought” considered by Giovanni M. Accame (as well as Gisella Vismara) with such insight and involvement, to venture into the last years of Romiti’s activity (the 1980s/90s): years and works more improvised, one might say, yet permeated by a deeply experienced creative search before it appeared to be neglected, and recently brought to light in a show curated by Michela Scolaro at the Fondazione Del Monte in Bologna. It is indeed in those years—in the works matured in that period—that my eyes clarify Accame’s intuition about the “movement” that seems to animate the works themselves. And it produces a fluctuation, between the idea of “dynamism” and that of “immobility” (or timelessness) of Being, bringing to the foreground a “narrative syntax” that is no longer that of classical art (as indeed it was no longer in the earlier works): the “red thread of the narrative” has been lost and everything has become “non-narrative” (so roughly Mario Lavagetto expresses about Proust in His Quel Marcel!). The “movement” and “discontinuity” in Romiti find a correspondence in the infinite branches and transformations of the I in Proust—with the aim, moreover, of building a not unrealizable “permanence.” I allow myself to draw for Romiti’s painting on a critical parameter similar to the one so profitably indicated to me by Lavagetto, as well as to reaffirm that his retreat into himself and his own universe, reproached by some (not indispensable, especially for an artist, the listening, and even the love, of oneself?) also occurs in him to assume more deeply the other and the world of all (“je ne est pas moi” is cited by Lavagetto for Proust, as well as “je est un autre” for Rimbaud, cited by M. Scolaro for Romiti). His character (as well as, at least in part, the “aesthetic climate of the time”) is confirmed in the sporadic and contingent reflections offered now to the reader (to a kind of “minor language” Accame alludes to) which, together with the greater expressions of his painting, refer to the threatened balance of the title. But… threatened balance, precisely; not lost. Perhaps even preserved for a more coherent approach to reality: Romiti, in fact, so conveniently “oscillating” with respect to current events (and classicity) has transmitted through his art a firm image of the future, leaving us the concrete “approval”—more readily intuitable in the “black paintings”—of the 20th-century Avant-gardes, never detached from the need to safeguard an unforgettable memory, not centered only on himself, of our art through the centuries. Romiti did not disappear merely apparently in the path he followed; he never betrayed his most intimate, though often misunderstood vocation which calls, also for what I have defined as “relation” (and which was for us a kind of involuntary lifelong partnership performance) an intrusion of lived experience into the times of art. And vice versa.