Curiously, after having worked for ten years as a laborer for a
contractor at the Livorno locomotive depot, the well-known Livornopainter and sculptor Renato Spagnoli, in the 1950s and 1960s, while he
was undertaking his own artistic activity, had continued to work as a
painter for the Ferrovie dello Stato, impaling his works with the lead
colors used for painting trains. ---- Renato Spagnoli was born on
December 28, 1928 in Livorno in via Garibaldi, in the S. Marco
neighborhood with a long proletarian and subversive history, and since
his vocational schools, he had distinguished himself in geometric drawing.
Following the Anglo-American bombings, in May 1943 his family was forced
to leave the city, evacuating to the province of Pisa, to Marciana di
Cascina, and in fact the following month their home in via Garibaldi
would be razed to the ground. Returning to Livorno in 1944, he found
work in a stone quarry in Montenero (Livorno), until 1946 when he was
hired as a worker for a maintenance company at the Locomotive Depot in
Livorno, a job that would last, with different tasks and in different
plants, until 1956.
In 1948 he joined the Communist Party, organizing street cells and the
distribution of the press in the Stazione district, as well as
neighborhood parties of the Unità and dance evenings.
In 1956, finally, he won a competition of the Ferrovie dello Stato as a
painter, but above all in that year he began to draw from life with some
painter friends (Gianfranco Pogni, Mario Benedetti, Marino Socci,
Alfredo Fabbri and others).
The Sixties saw his cultural turning point: in 1960 he discovered jazz
and transgressive American literature (Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac...),
but above all he had a decisive encounter with contemporary research
art. In fact, with his painter friend and workmate, Giorgio Bartoli, an
anarchist railway worker, he visited the Venice Art Biennale and, in
particular, the Franz Kline room. American painter, one of the greatest
exponents of Informalism - a new, revolutionary vision of artistic
expression opened up to him. In 1961 he abandoned figurative art to move
on to abstraction, starting to experiment with action painting.
Between 1961 and 1963 he created his first experimental
abstract-geometric works.
In the winter of 1963-64, together with other avant-garde artists from
Livorno (Giorgio Bartoli, Mario Lido Graziani, Renato Lacquaniti) he was
among the founders of the "ATOMA Group", based at the Livorno Anarchist
Federation in via Ernesto Rossi 80, in a room on the first floor. The
one who promoted the happy meeting was above all Bartoli, already
started on this "informal" path and in contact with another painter of
the Livorno avant-garde, Renzo Izzi.
Some of them (Spagnoli, Lacquaniti, Graziani and Rizzi), already in
1961, had offered their works as a subscription to support the "Maria
Luisa Berneri" Community in Ronchi (MS).
The four of "Atoma" - that Jacques Kermoal would define as "engagé" -
were united by their research on language, writing and abstraction and
had significant critical and public feedback. Their works are present in
the most prestigious avant-garde exhibitions of those years. In May
1964, at the Galleria "Numero" of Fiamma Vigo, in Florence, the group
debuts with its first "collective" and presents its first Manifesto (the
second is from the following year), published in full in the anarchist
magazine "Volontà".
"Atoma" is placed between Pop art and Geocentrism, but despite the
provincial culture of Livorno and the prevailing Macchiaioli school, it
manages to make space in the city and also in Italy; in Turin it
participates in the establishment of the Museo Sperimentale d'Arte.
At the end of 1966, "Atoma" formally dissolves and each continues on
their own path; some are now "professional" artists, Bartoli continues
to work on the railway. Spagnoli discovers in the graphic form of the
letter A all the potential of form and content that he will develop in
the following twenty years in every possible structural declination.
For almost thirty years, he used this letter as a graphic sign, with
various fonts, repeating it endlessly, breaking it down with different
media and on supports of any material (canvas, paper, wood,
methacrylate, aluminum).
In 1968 Spagnoli began to create works in silkscreen printing and on
methacrylate sheets. In the following years he worked, exhibited and
lived between Florence, Paris, Rome ... returning to Livorno, always
experimenting with new techniques and materials, in an attempt to
synthesise painting and sculpture, the protagonist of countless exhibitions.
In his hometown, two of his outdoor works are still clearly visible: the
red "Grande A" in Piazza Attias and the "Grido rosso" in Piazza Grande,
but his political commitment has not been forgotten, which also saw a
surreal episode.
In December 1969, in the days following the Piazza Fontana Massacre and
while the anti-Anarchist repression was underway, the lawyer of the
Galleria Sincron in Brescia, which was hosting an exhibition by
Spagnoli, fearfully had the A that was on display removed for a few days.
On the other hand, Spagnoli, already a friend of anarchists and close to
libertarian culture, in the Seventies made his artistic talent available
for solidarity with comrades unjustly imprisoned for the State Massacre,
participating in the exhibition "Artists against the State Massacre".
organized by the Tuscan Anarchist Groups; a circumstance remembered on
the occasion of his death in Livorno on March 13, 2019.
edited by Marco Rossi, in "CUB Rail" n. 82 August-September 2024
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
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