Untitled

Vittorio Matino (1943) approached figurative painting in the 1960s, following in the footsteps of Matisse, Klee and some of his immediate Italian predecessors such as Licini and Tancredi. In the 1970s he moved to Milan and often stayed in Paris. During these years, his painting style evolved towards an abstract expressionism, incorporating American painting into the Italian and European tradition. Against the disciples of Conceptualism, who rejected the use of canonical materials, Matino, together with other young abstractionists, decided to exalt the purity of painting by using traditional materials. In the following years he studied the transparencies of colour and the play of light, combining the Venetian school and the abstract luminosity of Bonnard and Rotchko, arriving at an abstractionism that was no longer expressionist or informal, but neither was it purely geometric.