Carlo Ciussi Biography
He was born on 26 January 1930 in Udine, where he died on 23 April 2012. After an internship in Fred Pittino's studio, between 1945 and 1949 he attended the artistic high school in Venice, where he was a pupil of Mario De Luigi for painting and Giovanni Majoli for the graphics. In the 1948 Biennale he was fascinated by the work of Picasso and the retrospective of Gino Rossi, masters to whom he would refer during the entire cycle of figurative experiments. In the 1950s he worked at his father's printing house, acquiring technical knowledge which during his artistic activity allowed him to move with ease in the field of graphics. His first works (paintings depicting courtyards and gates) are neorealist in nature, but in the two-year period 1960-62 he progressively moved from figuration to abstraction. The partnership with Giuseppe Santomaso had a notable impact on the development of his art expressed in informal terms. In the Lost Country cycle, however, the black signs of the informal are replaced by geometric elements, in particular squares that alternate with circles. He participated in the 1964 Biennial exhibiting five works. Subsequently, there was a progressive reduction in the complexity of signs until, even before 1980, the works became compositions with very often horizontal chromatic bands, or with broken lines, almost dynamic fragments of larger forms, pairs of polychrome signs with a sinuous that intersect with others and dialogue in a tangled whole of rare suggestion.
