Carlo Alfano was born in Naples on the 22nd of May 1932. He studies at the Academy of Fine arts of Naples and then becomes a painter and an exponent of the intermedial art. His research id focused on the hard attempt to show the irrepresentable, the scomposition and the fragmentation. Carlo Alfano could be defined as the explorer of fragments. His conception about art is conceivedon the self-representation as a subjective and objective element of the universe. In his whole works a tendency to self questioning is a constant, to ask questions on the meaning of the representation, of the act of painting and, in a deeper philosophical meaning, of the human exhistence: the temporarity is expressed as selfreflection, as a research for an open space of a human being, who share his own self with the world. Carlo Alfano presents his own first solo exhibition in Naples in 1955. After that one, many solos and collectives have been set up -in particular in his region, Campania, and overseas, especially in Germany. From his first experience in informal figurative painting, Carlo Alfano is able to reach in 1962 geometrical shapes thanks to the use of metallic cilinders, which give back distorted reflexes. In 1965, Carlo Alfano had the chance to know the art dealer, Lucio Amelio, when the last one opened his new gallery: the Modern Art Agency; there, Lucio Amelio, migrated after to New York, curated for three times (in 1966, 1969 and 1970) the artis’s solos exhibitions. During the late Sixtie’s, Carlo Alfano is shortly well-known for his audiovisual projects, as ‘Stanza per voci’ and ‘Archivio delle Nominazioni’ (1969). Between 1969 and 1990, year if his death, he worked at the cycle ‘Frammenti di un autoritratto anonimo’, self-analysis in a dialogic form made by caracters, numbers and group of signs described in particular and compound by an equilibrated rhytm. Starting from the Eightie’s, the artist has been dedicated more on the relationship between light and shadow in painting. Carlo Alfano died in 1990, prematurely.

Photo Credit: Augusto De Luca – Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0