Antonio Calderara: A Certain Light, Estorick Collection, exhibition review: ‘Gentle formalism with roots in nature’
Untitled (The Market Square in Orta), 1929. Image: Anotnio Calderara / private collection
Antonio Calderara (1903-1978) is best known for his abstract work of the 1960s and 1970s, but a retrospective of the Italian painter at the Estorick Collection in Highbury displays a wide range of his earlier figurative canvasses.
Inspired by the landscape and light of the area around Lake Orta in norther Italy where he lived, his paintings of the 1920s and 1930s prefigure the geometric precision and subtle pastel colours of his later abstract compositions.
Landscapes and figures are rendered as somewhat ethereal forms that seem to float in space.
Antonio Calderara. Copyright: Fondazione Antonio / Carmela Calderara. Photograph: H. Schmitt-Siegel
Gradually in the 1950s, Calderara’s work became unmoored from objects in the world, as he immersed himself in the international trend toward abstraction.
He described his aims during this period in somewhat enigmatic terms: “structure and reason should never overshadow emotion, which I like to define as poetry”, but the poetic emerges clearly in Calderara’s later work through harmonious blocks of colour, soothing on the eye.
This is a gentle formalism with roots in the natural world, yet very much of its time.
Antonio Calderara: A Certain Light runs until 22 December at Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, N1 2AN.