“Today we must make painting not ‘in the manner of so-and-so,’ but painting that speaks of our times, our violence, our sentence to live: of these strong, aggressive things.”
—Emilio VedovaBrimming with pulsating, vigorous energy, Ciclo della Protesta (Brasile '56), 1956, vividly illustrates Emilio Vedova’s dynamic approach to abstraction. The image stands as a significant representation of the artist’s acclaimed Ciclo della Protesta or “Cycle of Protests” series, which he executed in the 1950s. Foregrounding the raw expressive potential and emphasis on materials championed by Arte informale, these works reflected Vedova’s assertion that radical, politically-engaged art should be abstract. A flurry of vibrant strokes sweep across the surface, coalescing in a centripetal array of cadmium red and yellow elements. Overlapping and jostling against each other, collaged papers animate the picture plane and extend this sense of materiality. Despite their seeming spontaneity, these forms confront each other with an intense yet controlled harmony of composition. “If you look at the tension in my burning signs, it is easy to label them Informal!” Vedova explained. “But that is superficial. These works are structured—and these are the structures of my consciousness.”ⁱ

 

Vedova’s practice expressed a political consciousness as early as the late 1930s, when his work began responding to the trauma and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War. Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica (1937), which depicted the Nationalist bombing of the city in northern Spain, became a significant point of reference for Vedova. In 1946, he signed the “Beyond Guernica” manifesto, which urged Italian artists to engage with contemporaneous political concerns while evading the constraints of figuration. “The violent class of different situations/conflicts that contemporary man has to bear every day is Vedova’s central theme,” the art historian Werner Haftmann elucidated.ⁱⁱ The gestural smears and strokes of paint in Ciclo della Protesta (Brasile '56) convey the horror and violence that characterized the political reality of the Post-War era.

 

Ciclo della Protesta (Brasile '56) is from a smaller body of work within the Ciclo della Protesta that Vedova executed in the winter of 1955 and 1956 on a mountain vacation in Monte Terminillo, Rieti. These works were inspired by a recent trip he and his wife Annabianca had taken to Brazil for the artist to participate in the São Paulo Biennial in 1954; while there, he was awarded a Morganti Foundation prize that allowed him to stay in the country for three more months. From January to March, he travelled throughout Brazil, encountering the country’s stunning forests and natural beauty as well as the coffee plantations and fazendas found further inland. The decade of the 1950s marked a crucial moment in the economic development of Brazil, as rapid industrialization and wealth inequality led to acute hardship among workers. The extreme poverty Vedova witnessed during his time in Brazil galvanized him to produce Ciclo della Protesta (Brasile '56) as a challenge to the injustices that faced both Latin America and all of humanity.

 

The vitality and conflict between forms found in the present work seems to allude to the energized visual idiom of Vedova’s pre-World War I forebearers, the Italian Futurists. However, while the Futurists aestheticized the brutal aggression of their generation’s technological progress and social upheaval, Ciclo della Protesta (Brasile '56) evinces the disturbing and insidious nature of the modern world. In this way, the work does not portray a protest but instead constitutes Vedova’s own moral protest to the fractured state of humanity: it is a condemnation of discrimination and violence in abstract terms. “His paintings… arise from an abstract fury or painful anger,” Hartmann expressed. “They reveal… the gestures of protest and contradiction. Their dynamic force, their vitality is for freedom in the self-realization of the human being.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

 

ⁱ  Emilio Vedova, quoted in Emilio Vedova, exh. cat., Galerie Günther Franke, Munich, 1989.

ⁱⁱ Werner Haftmann, “Vedova,” in Emilio Vedova, exh. cat., Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento, p. 53.

ⁱⁱⁱ Haftmann, “Emilio Vedova,” in Emilio Vedova, exh. cat., Galerie Günther Franke, Munich, 1989.