Ennio Finzi (1931-2024) - Opere transcromatiche

Transchromatic Scale (1978)
Pencil and oil pastels on paper.
With cornice
Signed at the bottom right.
Work accompanied by a storage certificate issued by the Ennio Finzi archive.

The works from the transcromatico period are Finzi's most significant and sought-after pieces. They are increasingly rare and continually on the rise.
This one with four bands is a gem for the master's collectors.





Ennio Finzi was considered, unofficially, the last living spatial painter; since he was 16 in 1947, as he later recalled, he could not be registered with the spatialist painting movement as Tancredi Parmeggiani (1927–1964) was at the time, a twenty-year-old.

The friendship and artistic sharing with the great painter Tancredi, who was also celebrated through important critical writings and exhibitions, undoubtedly led him to associate with some of the most prominent figures in painting and culture of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Sottsass, Umbro Apollonio, and to work closely with the leading Venetian masters of that movement, like Virgilio Guidi, Riccardo Licata, or Emilio Vedova. It was always Tancredi who introduced him to the great American collector Peggy Guggenheim. Throughout the 1950s, Finzi pursued a fundamentally spatialist research focused on the use of color and dissonant, atonal effects, also interpreting the new musical currents of those years, from Schoenbergian atonality to the jazz 'bop' of African American jazz. In fact, for Finzi, music held a fundamental significance, as he himself recalled that for him, the perception of color occurred only fifty percent through sight and the other fifty percent through hearing, since color was not only an image but also a sound.

From 1960 to 1978, also due to issues related to the difficulty of selling spatialist works in a historical moment favoring other types of research, he decided to fully adopt the most contemporary principles of scientific and technological analysis typical of those years. However, unlike the artists of the Gruppo N, who actually used electronics and lighting technology in their works, he aimed to create the same premises with an analytical type of *Non-Pittura* in black and white, which diverged from the previous strong chromaticism, focusing on automatism and the combination of rhythms. He increasingly approached Cinetismo.

Since 1978, Finzi rediscovered color, opening a season that in some way followed that overwhelming bombardment of images which became predominant in the early 1980s, so much so that by the mid-80s, tired of that intensity, he sought a kind of return to meditative interiority, combining black fields with the use of color for resurfacing, for emergence. See the cycle of 'Nero-Acromatico' then 'Neroiride', heavily inspired by the music of Luigi Nono, which later led him in the 1990s to the series of 'Grammaticando' and then 'Flipper', where he aimed to organize a coded pictorial language through signs and contrasting operations. Ennio Finzi, however, continually sought over the years a way to express the very essence of the 'idea', of sensation, using the pictorial medium as a tool and not wanting to preemptively construct a recognizable style for the sake of painting itself. Considering the entire course of his work over the years, with its inconsistencies and contradictions, glimpsing an underlying thread rather than interpreting each individual artistic moment as standalone was therefore the key to understanding Finzi's style.

He began exhibiting in 1949 at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, where in 1956 he held his first solo exhibition, and in 1980, the foundation also dedicated an anthological exhibition to him.

Participated in the 8th and 13th Rome Quadriennale in 1959 and 1999, respectively, and in the 42nd Venice Biennale of Art in 1986.

He lived and worked in Venice-Mestre, where he taught at the Venice Academy. He died at his home in Mestre on June 19, 2024, at the age of 93.