Nuvolo

Early life

Nuvolo was born on October 12, 1926 in Città di Castello, among the major Italian centers in typographic industry and his parents early involved him in their printing workshop. The nickname “Nuvolo” (cloud) was given him during the Second World War, when he was a teenager partisan and his fellows used to compare his quick appearances to a sudden cloud in the sky.

As a young artisan in the first following years after the war, he soon showed manual skills in various fields, from decoration to set design, and gradually focused his attention on silk printing and its potential uses, either in his family workshop or at the local graphic arts school, where he found teachers who fostered his disposition toward exploration.

In Rome with Alberto Burri

It was in Rome that, following his friend and fellow countryman Alberto Burri’s suggestion, he moved in 1949. Nuvolo primarily became his collaborator in the Burri’s studio at Via Margutta and matched his work as an advertising artist with the first series of his screen printing forays into the visual arts field. Albeit with the little means of the time, he managed to introduce the photographic serigraphy techniques and he was the first Italian to use it artistically, using potassium dichromate gelatins borrowed from the rotogravure technique.

If in such graphic experiments he was initially influenced by his friend’s matter research, Nuvolo would soon find his own creative autonomy in this medium in which he was an innovator.

The “informal” climate

Working as an aid for Burri, Nuvolo got more and more in touch with a group of informal painting artists who characterized that decade. He associated with the Gruppo Origine, founded between 1949 and 1950 and formed by Corrado Cagli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Mario Balocco, Ettore Colla and Burri himself, sharing an interest for new materials to connect to painting and a progressive departure from the use of paintbrush.

Although silk screen tools were very poor at the times, he was the first in Italy, to adpt it for artistic goals, he started creating abstract figures by silk screen, adopting dichromate gel, taken from the rotogravure printing technique.

The “serotipie”

The quality improvement of screens around the middle of the Fifties helped him achieve new results in terms of printing and graphic experimentation: in 1954, “Arti Visive”, Gruppo Origine’s programmatic journal (alternitavely directed by Ettore Colla and by poet and Biblicist Emilio Villa along with his brother Ascanio Ascani), displayed his first official works on its covers and within its pages.

The name “Serotipie” was coined by Emilio Villa, who found a new artistic meaning for the silk screen abstract works, not intending them as reproduction series but unique printing works, made by an industrial tool and elaborated by acrylic and other materials. Interested on the role of causality in arts, similarly to what happened with Pollock’s dripping, and focusing on various fields like physic, astronomy and mathematics, Nuvolo gave a new status to silk screen tool and its artistic potential.

Paintings and collages at the silk screen

In 1956 Nuvolo married Liana Baracchi and organized a graphic atelier which was administrated by them for more than fifty years, previously in Rome and, by Early Eighties, in the native Città di Castello. The silk screen printing became a starting point to a vast artistic application which covered in the years very different fields as weaving, graphic arts, digital graphics and video art, primarily considered by the author a private field of research and expression, more than elements for the market of arts. As the critic Bruno Corà wrote, “the Mondrian and Burri lesson found Nuvolo as exponent of principles so able to create an additional zone of poetic sensibility between the Cartesian rigor of the Dutch and the epic and dramatic nature of the Italian”.

Sewing machine production

Appling a small motor to a simple Vigorelli sewing machine, Nuvolo started in the early Sixties a new cycle of spatial construction. Textiles and fabrics led to unexpected geometric solutions “mixing – as the critic Gillo Dorfles wrote – the precedent experiences of Patchwork and Ready Made” in the series “Tensioni” (Tensions), “Diagrammi” (Diagrams) and “Daini” (Deers).

New frontiers in serigraphy

The formal conjunctions of the “Oigrog” series, in the decade 1967/1977 with the anagrammatic title of the artist name “Giorgio”, established a new serigraphic production based on the principles of fluid mechanics. The author used nitro colors giving life to psychedelic figures “simultaneously archetypical and android, as a last dynasty of golems produced by arts”. The “Modulari” of 1969/1971 defined a new dynamic progression in symmetrical secularity of photographs obtained by silk screen.

Digital production

A new formal concept based on vector mathematics was allowed to Nuvolo by the developing of Informatics in the early Eighties, supported by his sons Giorgio, photographer and Paolo, computer technician. In “Alpha 39” (1987/89) series he used the binary code while his scientific approach led to the “Aftermandelbrot” series (1989/1992), which followed the fractal theories of Benoît Mandelbrot to force it through a combination of “guided errors”, deviations to the formula by computer, which created a proliferation of images by colors related to numerical values.

This computer graphics production led to production of the Nineties with the cycles of “Circuiti” (Circuits), “Dittici e Trittici” (Diptychs and Triptychs), “Enantiomorfi” (Enantiomorphs), “Omogeni”, till the last “Turbolenze” (Turbulences) of 1998 and “Legni Collage” (Wood collage) of 2002. The various applications of the “Genesi” (Genesis) cycle, started around 1994, combined a particular manual intervention and a deeply pondered dialogue with video and sound based on the symphonies of Bach. Aftermandelbrot 1992 Serigraphy on Rosaspina Fabriano paper, private collection

Main exhibitions and collaborations

The first personal exhibition by Nuvolo was held in 1955 at the roman Gallery “Le carrozze” and it was presented by the poet Emilio Villa. In the same year Corrado Cagli organized the second one in Florence while the painter began to participate to various collective exhibitions with the coeval innovators of Informal paintings like Burri, Capogrossi, Turcato, Franchina, Sterpini, Mirko, Cagli, Fasola, Mannucci, Accardi, Sanfilippo, Perilli and Dorazio. He participated to important festivals as the Quadriennale in Roma and the Premio Lissone, which led him to the attention of Lucio Fontana and the innovators in Milan, while he started a lifetime collaboration with Ettore Colla.

Nuvolo innovative activity was also encouraged by Peggy Guggenheim, who bought some of his works at “La Tartaruga” Gallery in Rome, for her collections in US and Italy. Around 1967 he started a long and important collaboration in the field of graphic arts with many contemporary artists like Corrado Cagli, Renato Guttuso, Jannis Kounellis, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Alberto Burri, who came back to work with him after many years for the chromatic cycle “Sestante” in the Mid Eighties.

In 2002 he returned to produce the “esoedizioni” with various authors and critics exposing the works at the XVIII Century typography in his hometown, Grifani Donati, alongside the collaborator Marco Baldicchi.

To celebrate the fifty years of his activity Perugia and his hometown Città di Castello hosted an articulated exhibition along a complete monographic study of his art by the critic Bruno Corà, “Nuvolo, the painting space between order and chaos”.

Teaching

In 1977, after some years of teaching in the schools of arts in and outside Rome he won the Chair of Painting Arts at the Academy of fine arts of Perugia, where he became director from 1979 to 1984. Under his guidance the athenaeum reached a new way in teaching and promoting arts so that many important contemporary artists were invited and actively collaborated with the institution.

The Nuvolo Archive

When the artist passed away in his hometown on December 2008, Nuvolo was already entered in the small circle of contemporary arts innovators and today his works are dislocated in some of the major museums of Italy, France, Israel and United States.

In 2015 the family of the artist founded the “Nuvolo Archive” and donated to the Pinacoteca Comunale, Città di Castello some of his main works, which now sit among the rich historic and artistic heritage of the city.