Antonio Calderara, born in 1903 in Abbiategrasso, Italy, continued to create until his passing in 1978. Living a solitary existence in Northern Italy, he found inspiration in the luminosity of the nearby landscapes, particularly Lake Orta. Calderara possessed an enigmatic complexity that defied any strict categorization in the art world. Despite meeting numerous Italian and foreign artists during his lifetime, he maintained his personal freedom and individuality in his expression.
A self-taught artist from a young age, Calderara later received guidance from Lucio Fontana. His earliest influences included the figuration and manipulation of light by Piero della Francesca, Seurat, and Milanese Novecento painters. In 1925, after abandoning his engineering studies at university, he dedicated himself fully to experimenting with color and form. Through his depictions of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, he captured the essence of his homeland, suffused with a delicate, ethereal light inspired by the atmospheric glow of Lake Orta in Vacciago. This served as his home base since 1934, when he moved there with his wife Carmela, and where he continued to work for the majority of his life.
In the mid-1950s, Calderara began to depart from representational painting and embraced a more geometric approach. This shift dramatically reduced both the size and elements in his compositions. Despite this, his essential vocabulary of clean lines and squares, refined color palette, and precise measurements aligned him with other minimalist painters of the time, such as Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, whom the artist greatly admired. In explaining his sudden transition to abstraction, Calderara wrote, “In 1958…I drew my last curved line.”
It is his abstract period that Calderara is most renowned for. His abstract paintings from the late 1950s and 1960s fuse geometric abstraction with a hazy finish, creating a misty quality through subtle, almost imperceptible variations in color.
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