Antonio Secci Biography
Antonio Secci, born in Dorgali (NU) in 1944. Lives and works in Cala Gonone (NU). He trained as an artist in Sardinia at the turn of the mid-1950s, in a condition of silence and isolation. Nature is the source of inspiration and curiosity. Antonio Secci temporarily leaves Sardinia to move to Milan in 1966, driven in this choice by two artists he met on the island. They were Gianni Dova and Guy Harlotf, who - impressed by the pictorial qualities of the young man, just twenty-two years old - invited him to move to the metropolis and insisted that he enroll at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In reality, at that moment, before arriving in Lombardy, Secci practiced a sort of naive surrealism which, compared with his subsequent research, cannot absolutely be considered significant, but already in the way of dealing with the scenic surface of the painting, in the ability to give the form an airy and independent breath compared to the background plane, he shows a strong sense of space. It is logical that this acute sensitivity, currently applied to dreamlike figurations, particularly interests Dova: the Roman artist - now Milanese by adoption - after having signed the First Space Manifesto in 1967, together with Fontana, Joppolo and Tullier and after having part, in the 1950s, of Baj and Dangelo's Nuclear Movement, he has long turned towards a surrealist abstraction that merges pictorial matter with the representation of metamorphic and geometricizing characters. In the style of the young Sardinian author you can therefore read a common feeling which, admittedly, brings them closer. And that Harloff and Dova were not wrong is demonstrated, just two years later, by Metamorphosis, a work later published in a personal catalog in 1989. During these years of 'apprenticeship' the artist from Dorgali will follow and see closely the creation of series such as those of Suns, Eclipses and Landscapes. Even Crippa, an already famous artist, with participation in the Venice Biennale and personal exhibitions in galleries that were decidedly important at the time, firmly believed in the abilities of the Sardinian artist, so much so that he dedicated a presentation paper to him and, in 1970, signed two Compositions. The artist from Monza is no stranger to the creation of 'four-handed' works but, before Antonio Secci, only Lucio Fontana and Victor Brauner (i.e. the theorist of Spatialism and one of the most important exponents of Surrealism). This trust encourages Secci and pushes gallery owners and collectors to take an interest in his research. The two works are the result of a simple and immediate collaboration, based on the superposition of the distinctive signs of the two artists: in one work Crippa paints, in an effectively stylized way, a fiery red and perfectly spherical Sun, with a strong chromatic and emotional impact, setting on a panorama made up of barely visible and slightly oblique lines of light; in the other a synthetic, finely tactile Landscape. In the works of these years - from 1970 to 1972 - the artist, who considers metals as 'thought-impulses capable of intervening on a agitated matter (but not yet as much as it will be later), decided to fight, in his own way , the sacred and binding Void of the canvas, making some of the assumptions of the spatialists his own, Secci also wants to overcome the two-dimensional "frontiers" of the painting, he intends to treat real space within artistic reflection. He does this by highlighting - with a convulsive and apparently gestural sign, but in reality carefully designing - the crack points of the work, violating its limits thanks to speed. The sign is in fact above all fast, which is why the result seems to be only the trace of an airplane, too fast to be seen, but capable of leaving a burnt, aggressive and modernist footprint of its passage. The imprints that remain on the throbbing colored backgrounds certify that, previously, a dazzling event took place, of which those signs are the description, the ideogram capable of evoking it. The speed of the gesture and the pulsating desire for transformation that he finds in the material can only direct Secci towards an idea of overbearing and immediate mutation. This intuition, which would later definitively take shape in the series of lightning explosions, produced the works exhibited in March 1972 at Diarcon Due Arte Contemporanea in Milan.
