Alfredo Billetto Biography
Alfredo Billetto was born in Turin in 1932 and, as a teenager, began dedicating himself to ceramics in Alberto Nobili's workshop. Subsequently, he stayed in Spain, Holland, Africa and France, but it was Turin that marked the artist's experiments and consecrated him among the most appreciated signatures of the first and second twentieth centuries. Despite his shy and reserved character, Billetto cultivated important friendships with the most famous exponents of local art, starting with the painter Cesare Maggi, whose painting courses he attended at the Accademia Albertina in Turin from '45 to '48 . Subsequently he also attended the school of Felice Casorati and subsequently his son Francesco, but also Mario Giansone, Umberto Mastroianni, Piero Ruggeri, Mauro Chessa and Giacomo Soffiantino. Billetto aimed at synthesis and addressed different languages and techniques, touching on expressionist, cubist, abstract, hyperrealist, pop and informal linguistic outcomes to give life to an unparalleled personal and intimate production of signs, paintings and sculptures. The permanence of the forms of geometry and plasticism, with marked effects of collage, painting-writing makes use of a pictorial background in refined dove gray and gray tones and transforms the harmonious composition into a dreamlike vision, a hidden view in dim light: beloved bodies which unfold in an inspiration of senses and thoughts, favored by sign and colour. The graphic ability emerges from the drawings, the "closed" and dilated figures in bodily exercises sometimes substantiated by tempera backgrounds. The colors are permeated with clear clarity of shapes and structures where the clear surfaces, now angled, now curved, merge in a figural dance with surreal tones that chase the visual memory. His thought and his stylistic research mix, evolve and find themselves in the light air forms and in the refined oils on canvas in which his compositional and chromatic enchantment materializes.
