Alberto Cavalieri Biography
Alberto Cavalieri (1927 - 2011) was an Italian painter and sculptor. A self-taught painter who occasionally attended the Ligurian Academy of Fine Arts in Genoa, he initially concentrated on the traditional "didactic" themes of landscape and still life before turning his attention to the study of the human figure. In 1949 he held his first exhibition at the Casa del Popolo di Rivarolo in Genoa. Having moved to Milan in 1952, the following year his visual culture began to grow in the direction of that "sign" abstractionism, which would later become his determining aesthetic code. In 1966 he held his first personal exhibition in Milan, at the Galleria Arte Centro, in which he exhibited works that he defined as "anthropomorphic forms" because, although they had already begun to reduce the expressive trait in a "strongly calligraphic" sense, they were still centered on the human figure or its details. The decade between the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies, with the closeness to the abstractionists of Como and in particular to Mario Radice. The predilection for graphics marks a radical turn towards lyrical stylization which, marked by progressive phases, keeps pace with an introspective development. From the compositions with tight textures and obsessive drafts, which give rise to an inextricable horror vacui, the texture later dissolves to form sparse and dynamic networks that hover in space. The artist has exalted the potential for interaction between the forces at play during his production, relying increasingly on the examination and balance of lines in tension. Its graphic characteristics are still recognizable today thanks to rarefactions, stratifications and aggregations, which maintain the rhythmic order of the segments in convincing harmony.
