Prima dell’oro – carte, colori, segni “Before gold – cards, colours, signs”

Critique sheet

Opening the rich 2026 programme will be the retrospective exhibition ‘Before Gold – Papers, Colours, Signs‘ dedicated to Aldo Contini. Painter, sculptor, designer, Aldo Contini, with an artistic research that starts in the 1950s and ends in the first decade of the new century, is universally recognised as one of the most significant figures in the panorama of contemporary artistic research in Sardinia. A path, that of Contini, which is configured as a complex and stratified trajectory, difficult to trace back to a linear development. Rather than a coherent and progressive itinerary, it resembles a constellation of autonomous episodes, each of which seems to be born and fulfilled in itself, while maintaining a secret internal continuity. Contini appears, in fact, profoundly ‘painterly’, even when he works at the limits or beyond the boundaries of painting itself. His extraordinary technical expertise – also matured through his design experience at ISOLA alongside Eugenio Tavolara – is accompanied by a conceptual tension that leads him to incessantly question the very meaning of painting.

The exhibition that the Museo Organica dedicates to Contini takes shape from a fortuitous, almost revelatory episode, which fits perfectly into the very logic of his work: an unexpected apparition, a trace that re-emerged from an area that had long remained in the shadows. Ten years after the artist’s death, access to his studio – which remained intact, never to be visited again after his death – represented a privileged moment, a true cognitive gateway through which to come into contact with the entire arc of his production. Not only the completed works, but above all that subterranean fabric made up of notes, sketches, notebooks, projects: an incessant workshop in which thought sediments and is transformed into images. Curated by Giannella Demuro.

Biography

Photographs

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