Toti Scialoja

The career of Toti Scialoja, an underrated protagonist of Italian abstraction, encompassed a variety of styles. It’s a wonder, then, that this exhibition manages to present such a comprehensive view of the late artist’s final vision. Scialoja was a European ambassador for Abstract Expressionism, and his last two decades were characterized by vitality, anger, and generosity, as evidenced by his work, which privileges dramatic, poetic drips and gushing swaths of paint over image. The artist’s paintings reflect an automatism that implies the whole body, one that is not bound to a discourse between sign and movement, but one that gives birth to vivid colors and an emotionally evocative use of space. In Scialoja’s work, the theme of time is not related to action, but rather discernable via layers of perception. New elements surface after a first look, and the works on view can be separated into roughly two groups: The first is characterized by few iconographic signs and gestures that ennoble the surface, transforming it into, as the artist declares, “a spatial resonance.” (One good example of this style is Per W.d.K. 20.3.1997, an homage to Scialoja’s friend Willem de Kooning.) The other group is rhythmically rich and spatially dense, giving chromatic expression to dialogues (or fights), as colors tend not to merge together but rather emerge from one another, forming an agitated harmony.