Giangiacomo Spadari’s “Concrete Utopias” of the early ’70s are documents two times over. Intended as visual essays on moments of revolutionary history, these bold, poster-like paintings have become, at two decades’ distance, irrefutable records of their own political and artistic moment—the halcyon days after May 1968 when all utopias seemed concrete, and when European artists like Spadari felt at one with their social calling.

Although Spadari had addressed political themes since the mid ’60s, with 1968, he explains, came “the urgency of approaching events with my own tools, those of painting.”