Decalage Biography
Felix de' Cavero, Attilio Aloisi and Nardo Girard were a trio of painters known as “Decalage” for over thirty years. The group's name was derived from the first syllables of the surnames of two of the members, Felix de' Cavero and Attilio Aloisi, to which the ending “age” was added as a tribute to collage.
Their first work dates back to 1953 and their distinctive technique consisted of the use of six-handed painting, where each member of the group contributed their own artistic sensitivity to the works. Additionally, “Decalage” invented a wood impregnation technique for their panel paintings. Indeed, in the works one could and can see the punctual reflections, even if, for their part, with lucid critical distance, the common distinctive features of the transformations intrinsic to the Piedmontese and Italian cultural climate, from the first acute artistic disputes of the post-war period between "abstract" and "figurative", to the subsequent consolidation - for a substantial part of artistic research - of the return to figuration, up to the appropriation of "capricious" creative modules, regarding which Marziano Bernardi had spoken in 1970 of "surrealism without shivers of restlessness
Their poetics is divided into three periods that intersect with each other: the first, figurative, goes from 1953 to 1969/70, the second, romantic-figurative, from 1966 to 1987 and the third, surrealist, from 1961 to 1979. " Decalage” was considered an innovative group and had formed a modern artistic laboratory with artisans and architects who used new materials and techniques, such as Rilevial, a patented product developed with the help of a chemist from the "Duco" company of Avigliana.
