Composition 50-218

Rigorous composition and a balance of form and colour are the distinctive features of Manlio Rho’s painting from his most mature period, after the experience of abstraction in the 1930s, in which he was a leading figure. Although in the works of the earlier period Rho was already showing a more rigorous and geometric inclination than the other abstract artists, who always displayed a certain lyricism and a concession to the pictorialism in the brushstrokes, in the paintings like this emerging after the war, his rational abstraction left no room for lyricism. Composition 50-218 plays with the balance between the orthogonal linearity of the shapes at the sides and the diagonal of the central area, thus giving the work an oxymoronic sense of blocked dynamism. Only the skilfully measured nuances of colour give the work its pictorial quality. (E. Di Raddo)