Comune di Cagliari Assessorato alla Cultura	Centro comunale d'arte e cultura
Aldo Contini "Retablo"
"Retablo" (2000) gold leaf and acrylic on wood

The delimitation of the surface is the first act with which Aldo Contini faces the space of the installation as an expansive field, the point of convergence of manifold visual codes that sink their roots in the history of artistic forms.

The initial approach therefore regards the need for a frontal view which in three panels gather a path of signs that escape from the centre, scattering themselves in the vastness of the walls like magnificent signals/indications of a sublimed and perfect vision.

The work belongs to the cycle of the "retablos" (retables) which in these years Contini has been investigating with a rigorous pictorial conceptuality while never losing sight, however, of the effective value of the form, that handicraft sustenance which leads the image to become sensitive body, tangible in the most minimum details that mark its appearance. We know that the "retablo" of XIV and XV Catalan culture grafted itself on and within Sardinian artistic consciousness, becoming a profound historical characteristic of it besides being an aesthetic product. In paying careful attention to tradition, for Contini it is the element that coalesces structural solidity with the search for a luminous spatiality in which the idea of temporality is visible in the rhythmical scansion of the parts, in the equilibrated union of the diverse components.

The imaginative tension is addressed to the supremacy of pure sensitivity, that which played a decisive role in the work by Malevich when the individual images break loose in the form of fragments beyond the utopia of the unitary and perspective space. In this respect, what is spiritual is not so much the place of the icon as the instrument of mystical elevation as it is the sense of total freedom which the painting achieves by way of the colour-light.

In fact, the luminosity lies in the expansive action of the surface, in the generative value of the emptiness which takes on resonances in every point of the symbolic narration, be this within the icons in finely coloured wood or in the intervals that make the painted elements take part in a process of reciprocal becoming.

The abstract thought of the forms brought into play hovers by way of these signs of escape from rationality, orientations that move in all directions, that declare themselves in the presence although they make the weight of absence felt, in the same way that the artist also places creative energy in what he hides.

Painting is the meeting between sensitivity and culture, it explores the mystery of form, it regulates the rhythm of the canon, it determines a system of reference and, at the same time, breaks its rules.

Contini loves to practice the experimentation of doubt, he places language in balance, suspended upon itself, he forces it towards extreme equilibriums and subverts the too linear procedures. Substantially speaking, he negates what he affirms, he de-constructs what he has just produced. He declares the truth but is the first not to believe in it.

This "antiphrastic" attitude is to be found in some linguistic choices, above all in the use of the materials which on the one hand are chosen for their intrinsic quality while, on the other, they are negated due to their own characteristics. On some panels one notes that the writing enters the limpid clarity of the surface in an enigmatic way. In another example the perfect form of the octagon is seriously challenged by an hexagonal structure which breaks its equilibrium. Moreover, the real gold cannot be distinguished from the false gold in such a way that to decipher the various aspects of the vision becomes a risky operation which places the reader before the illusion of painting, before its splendid ambiguity.

By means of these subtle procedures Contini solicits a sensorial and mental space in the metaphor of the "retablo" which sorely tries the architecture of conventional language. And Contini does this with irony and imagination in never having the pretension to indicate a mode of behaviour above the parts in question. Rather, he both intends and understands the sense of art as living presence, as a project in development. The unpredictable mobility of the image apart from and beyond itself.

Aldo Contini

Aldo Contini’s artistic formation began in Sassari during the 1950’s. From 1959 until 1963 he worked at ISOLA (Institute for the Sardinian Organization of Craft Work) together with Eugenio Tavolara. During the same period he began his teaching activity at the Istituto d’Arte of Sassari which was to last until 1989. With his adhesion to the "A Group" in 1965, a neo-avantgarde formation in Sassari with Mauro Manca as its inspiring exponent, Contini’s research work moved into the pictorial field to then definitely evolve in his adhesion to conceptual poetics during the years which followed. It was upon this line of research that he founded the "Rose Group" in 1976. From 1983 until 1986 he was the scientific coordinator at the Planning Department for Handicrafts at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Cagliari. Since 1989 Contini’s painting has been defined firstly in his "Stained-glass" works and then with his "Retablos", in the terms of a geometrizing abstraction in which particular care is addressed to the manual character of the execution.

Principal one-man exhibition and installations

1956	Mostra al Circolo della Caccia, Sassari.
1977	"90 Tautologie", Galleria Il Cancello, Sassari.
1979	Galleria Arte Duchamp, installazione, Cagliari
1983	"Transbooks", Galleria d’Arte Duchamp, Cagliari.
1989	"Aldo Contini," Galleria Comunale d’Arte, Cagliari.
1997	"Parerga, Magnificat", Palazzo Ducale, Sassari.
1998	"Percorsi dello Spirito", Cittadella dei Musei, Cagliari.
1999	"Magnificat", Centro Comunale d’Arte EXMA’, Cagliari.
1999	"Tecnica Mista e Foglia Oro", Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari.

Principal group exhibition

1956	"IV Mostra regionale delle Arti figurative", Nuoro.
1975	Mostra del "Gruppo della Rosa", Galleria Il Cancello, Sassari.
1982	"L’autre face de l’art en Sardaigne", Espace DA&DU, Parigi.
1983	"Venticinque anni di ricerca artistica in Sardegna", Nuoro.
1986-87	"Italics 1925-1985 – Sessant’anni di vita culturale in Italia" (con Gabriella Contini), mostra itinerante, Columbia University, New York – Palazzo Venezia, Roma.
1988	"Segni d’autore in Sardegna", Galleria Comunale d’arte, Cagliari.
1989	"Frequenze", Torri Aragonesi, Alghero.
1989	"Isola, Isole", Galleria Comunale d’Arte, Capo d’Orlando (PA).
1989	"Far libro", installazione, Forte Belvedere, Firenze
1995	"Lapis", Palazzo Pou Salit, Alghero.
1997	"La linea rende visibile", Centro Culturale Man Ray, Cagliari.