Antonio Freiles Biography
Antonio Freiles was born in Messina in 1943 and was an artist who played an important role in the practice of painting, especially during the seventies. In this era, in fact, painting had been abandoned in favor of a more conceptual approach, but Freiles decided to recover it. In the 1960s, the artist was already in contact with personalities on the international art scene, but his works still remained personal, silent and internalized. Freiles has always tried to investigate the limits of artistic means, increasing the possibilities in original and innovative expressive formulas.
In the 1980s, Antonio Freiles created a collection of paintings using oil paint and graffiti, which represented his new artistic epiphany, thanks to which space, matter and light interpenetrated. The basic spatial configuration and the pictorial space constructed through juxtaposed configurations in Freiles' paintings meant that the observer's eye was forced into a continuous perceptual movement.
With the Chartae series of paintings, executed on hand-made paper with cellulose pulp mixed with industrial dyes, Antonio Freiles wanted to highlight his continuous dialogue between the physicality of materials and technique and the immateriality and conceptual elaboration of rhythms and forms.
A peculiar characteristic of Freiles' artistic work is the way in which he set up in front of the viewer a visual plan examined in its formative phases and then led to a transmutation of image beyond the limit of any possible frame. Freiles' main concerns were the conformation of the color filling within the form on the canvas or paper.
Freiles was a painter of Mediterranean light, who was not afraid of the splendor of yellows, orange tones, the reds of the earth, the purples of the skylines of the seaside city where he lived and the deep shades of green.
Also active as a cultural operator, Freiles has worked to boost information exchanges between Sicily and numerous national and international artistic centers. He also worked as an artistic consultant for the Regional Province of Messina and organized the large "International Graphics" exhibitions at the Regional Museum of Messina, collaborating with the British Council in London, with the Ljubljana Graphics Biennial, with the Maeght Foundation in Paris , with the World Print Council of San Francisco.
Antonio Freiles passed away in 2021.
