Segnali di "ritorno alla pittura" negli anni Settanta italiani: la Pittura-Ambiente di Mimmo Paladino e Nicola De Maria

Up to now historical studies have thoroughly not investigated the cultural background and the early professional biography of the five painters Achille Bonito Oliva has includeded in the Transavant-garde (Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola de Maria and Mimmo Paladino) yet. The main obstacles to these studies go back to the birth of Transavant-garde. From one side, the documents concerning the past of the artists -those that would not justify the belated rehabilitation of the "traditional media"- were suddenly not taken into account; and, from the other side, it emerged a clear and schematic contrast between the Transavant-garde and the preceding experience of the Arte Povera and Conceptual Art through which the militant criticism interpreted this shift. The essay focuses on the story of the two transavant-gardists, Paladino and de Maria, with the aim of reconstructing how they join from the end of the sixties up to 1977, the "Environment-Painting" (a form of expanded and wall painting, here cosidered as a preliminary step to the Transavant-garde). The historical investigation has taken up again this corpus of documents intentionally ignored, and it has focused on the experimental beginnings of the two artists -beginnings related to the envirnoment, the performance, and particularly the photograph. Therefore, the essay tries to give a more complex interpretation of this corpus by comparing with the contrast suggested by the militant criticism and by founding out the continuity elements of painting, or the pictorial iconography, already present in the Italian neo-avant-garde (Arte Povera, Conceptual, etc...).