Ettore Innocente Biography
Ettore Innocente was born in Rome in 1934 and became an active artist on the contemporary art scene from the sixties until his death in 1987. Already during the period in which he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, he demonstrated a great passion for art and became friends with other artists such as Pascali and Kounellis, as well as having been a pupil of Scialoja. His artistic research focuses mainly on pictorial-material works.
In 1965, Cesare Vivaldi discovered him and offered him the opportunity to exhibit at his first solo exhibition at the Salita di Liverani, where he presented works that temporarily linked him to the panorama of so-called Roman pop art. Also in the same year, the Galleria La Salita invited him to participate in the collective exhibition Corradino di Svevia - subject exhibition, together with other artists such as Ceroli, Festa, Lombardo, Mambor, Mauri, Mondino, Pascali, Schifano, Tacchi and Titone.
In 1967, at the Galleria La Tartaruga, Innocente presented a series of wall sculptures made of industrial plastic material, some with marked color inserts, others white and with a strong spatial impact, also proposed at the Naviglio in Milan. Among these works are Forse graffio, Forse taglio and Lilevatore bianco vertical, which ironically refer to the artistic tradition, continuing the dialogue already started with his first exhibition.
In 1969, Innocente moved from the work to the device of direct interaction with the public: he invaded the spaces of the La Salita gallery with strips of heavy fabric, hooked to the walls and ceiling with metal eyelets to allow the spectator to act by hooking and unhooking them without any construct, as in the case of Useless Actions. In the same year he created the action 100 meters of freedom, in which a reel of raw canvas 10cm wide and 32cm in diameter, fixed in the center of the floor of his studio, was unrolled by the artist until it was exhausted, from the studio to the road. This action represents the amount of freedom granted by the art circuit, by one's social role, a clear manifestation of the limits imposed on free expression by the commodification of even man himself.
In the Seventies, Innocente developed an aesthetic project that entailed the "liberation" of art and found his paradoxical "form" in Take One. Innocente continued his artistic research until his premature death in 1987, leaving an indelible mark in the history of contemporary art.
