Eugenio Carmi: the return to painting in the Seventies and beyond

Abstract

The paper proposes a historical-critical analysis of the pictorial research of Eugenio Carmi (1920-2016), started in the seventies and developed in the following decades. The starting point of this reading is the artist’s solo exhibition at the Galleria Schwarz in Milan in autumn 1970, accompanied by a text by Umberto Eco. The semiologist emphasized the aesthetic and critical importance of the exhibited works, considering the diverse linguistic experiences, from graphics to sculpture, from multiple editions to public art, that the artist had experimented with until then. The article follows Eco's critical arguments to explore how Carmi's pictorial language is rooted in a series of experiences that are not clearly pictorial, but which contain a mature and well-established abstract-geometric alphabet. The pictorial production is analysed by considering emblematic works and investigating variations on the theme that the artist experienced in the eighties and nineties.