Ennio Chiggio Biography
He completed technical and then artistic studies in Venice where he intermittently attended the Academy and the Faculty of Architecture. During his studies in 1957 he began to paint using small informal graphic thickenings in black ink on paper and tempera compositions with chromatic fields surrounded by black marks on cardboard. In that period his interests changed and developed rapidly, visiting the exhibitions organized in Venice and Milan in private galleries and institutions such as Palazzo Grassi and the Biennale, La Triennale or through reading magazines such as SeleArte, Le Arti, Arte Oggi and the first art books from international publishers published in Italy. In 1958-59 he attended a group of young Paduan artists who followed free courses at the studio of Prof. Travaglia, a teacher open to the latest trends in contemporary art and architecture. Some of these students founded the Enne Group in Padua in 1959, which Chiggio joined. At first it is a large group of young people who try to follow local artistic events and in some way attend the various competitions for works of art in public procurement. These initial needs, which also implied more substantial problems, progressively come to light, the objectives are specified and then later the group is narrowed down to five elements; informal gestures are overcome to adhere to more structured formal compositions in a constructivist sense with a stronger attention to the psychology of form. These choices are stimulated by Massironi and Biasi through the exhibitions organized in Padua with the operating methods of the Motus artists and by the meetings with Castellani and Manzoni in Milan at Azimut. Chiggio, positively influenced by these visual structures, began to operate on sequential and repetitive spaces, developing the phenomenal component of the artistic act. From the foundation of the Enne Group until 1964, strongly motivated by collective work, he acted within the group's visual research even during the period of absence for military service, informed by Biasi and Costa about the group's activities through copious correspondence. Upon returning to Padua, he defines the operational scope with greater precision by constructing "objects" obtained from the folding and cutting of black cardboard, as a material perceptive structure capable of overcoming the pictorial randomness of the informal painting. The activities within the group become more intense and the awareness of object-works capable of modifying learning and artistic enjoyment according to the theories of form, information and quantum mechanics develops; at this moment the readings of John Dewey's essays are fundamental in the approach to knowledge. The group, already around 1961, defines its visual objects as "Open Work", according to the definition given by Umberto Eco, and with ever greater precision poses the statements of Programmed and Kinetic Art; in those years the prerequisites for collective action were clarified with the contribution of art historians Giulio Carlo Argan and Umbro Apollonio. In that period, Chiggio's individual interests also opened up to the problems of visual poetry, photographic concreteism and experimental music which will be presented in the personal exhibition at the Enne studio such as the three collections of visual poetic works and the photographic album Muralia. These interests, which also unite the other members of the collective, then led to the famous thematic-educational exhibitions at the Enne studio, so necessary on the epistemic level of research and on which a lot of effort was spent. The clear rejection of individuality to enhance the collective creative process will always find it difficult to implement, although Chiggio was always a convinced supporter of a group project that had to be presented anonymously to the outside; in fact, many works, produced from 1960 to 1965, were performed individually but were conceived within the collective formula and with this attitude they were sent to the various events. Objects still present in international museums, for market and institutional reasons, even due to negligence, appear with the names of the executors, interpreted as individual creators. We would like to point out here that in a very hasty manner, when the book on the Enne Group edited by Italo Mussa was written, further consistency was given to this contradictory attitude, while the economic management regulation of the association provided for collective management. Chiggio considers the exchanges of information with the international artists who converged in the New Tendencies and the unrepeatable climate of the meetings with the critic Matko Mestrovic which took place in Padua and then also in Zagreb to be very important for his artistic training. Almir Mavignier, known in the New Tendencies and frequented together with Toni Costa during their stays in Padua, Thomas Maldonado becomes mediator for the group's exhibition at Studio F in Ulm. On that occasion the Ennes visited the Hochschüle für Gestaltung and group perceptive research was considered so important for the teaching of visual communication of the Ulmian school that it was deemed possible to open a permanent research space there. In the same years, while attending the Faculty of Venice as students, the works of the Ennes also interested Prof. Carlo Scarpa who forwarded a request for funding to the CNR for the opening of a laboratory structure at the Institute of Architecture of Venice, of which Chiggio takes care of the epistolary editing. A similar situation arises at the Faculty of Letters of Padua with Prof. Umbro Apollonio supporting his newly established chair of Contemporary Art. However, these teaching procedures strongly desired by Chiggio and the Ennes were not implemented given the cultural climate of those years which was not available, in the teaching context, to the convergences between the academic and the private. Continuing the interests that had already manifested themselves during the exhibition on experimental music at the Enne studio curated by Silvano Bussotti, in 1964 Chiggio founded with Teresa Rampazzi the experimental phonology group NPS (Nuove Proposte Sonore) for the production of sound objects (Musica electronics). Chiggio opens a studio equipped with equipment for the production of synthetic sound events of which he also takes care of the theoretical aspect and the notation system. Some objects by Chiggio/NPS act as a sound space both in the Gruppo Enne section at the XXXII Venice Biennale in 1964 and in the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Lodz in 1967.
