The Nineteen seventies
If Informal Art offered a solution to the sectarian conflict between representationalism and abstractionism, in going back to representation at the end of the sixties, Profumo veered towards an entirely post-modern eclecticism that was to characterize his work in the following decade.
His many exhibitions, both in Italy and abroad, in 1971 (“Numero” and “Coin d'Art” in Genoa, “Bürdeke” in Zurig, “Galleria 7” in Baden and “Ur-Nina” in Damask) showed a series of paintings portraying visionary landscapes: barren mountains, valleys and hills, viewed from above. The colours are saturated and the chromatic combinations acid. The resulting landscapes are not of this world, poised between the sacred and the psychedelic, between Pasolini's Il Vangelo secondo San Matteo (1964) and Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odissey (1968).
In the exhibition at the Sarriò gallery in Barcellona in1972, these paintings were exhibited together with Neo-Surrealist paintings of oneiric inspiration: buildings inconsequently matched, planets and landscapes, flying dice and giant telephones which could illustrate a short story by Borges and a Pink Floyd album and, in fact, the interpretation of these pictures given by author Giorgio Calcagno in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Centrarte Falanto gallery in Brindisi is conventionally literary.
The most intriguing painting in the exhibition (the only one which appears in the catalogue) is Telex, where the incipit of St John's Gospel is transliterated into the code of teleprinters. Not without irony, the artist combines visual languages only apparently distant from one another: from the codified writing of conceptual art to the piano score, from informatics to the medieval illuminated manuscripts. A painting like Arena represents an interesting link with his later production as it combines the metaphysical tone of this phase with the formal synthesis that will characterize his last period.
In those years Profumo also began a new activity. He cooperated with Monuments and Fine Arts Offices and Architecture firms, planning the colours of single buildings as well as entire urban areas (his most productive collaboration was with architect Bernardetta Melzi di Cusano).
The most important of these collaborations, owing to its complexity, was the colour plan for the fishermen's village of the Isola Piana in Sardinia carried out at the end of the seventies. While the paintings of the first half of the decade were multi-coloured landscapes of the mind, Profumo could now use the landscape itself as his canvas and experiment with the natural ever-changing light.
His many exhibitions, both in Italy and abroad, in 1971 (“Numero” and “Coin d'Art” in Genoa, “Bürdeke” in Zurig, “Galleria 7” in Baden and “Ur-Nina” in Damask) showed a series of paintings portraying visionary landscapes: barren mountains, valleys and hills, viewed from above. The colours are saturated and the chromatic combinations acid. The resulting landscapes are not of this world, poised between the sacred and the psychedelic, between Pasolini's Il Vangelo secondo San Matteo (1964) and Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odissey (1968).
In the exhibition at the Sarriò gallery in Barcellona in1972, these paintings were exhibited together with Neo-Surrealist paintings of oneiric inspiration: buildings inconsequently matched, planets and landscapes, flying dice and giant telephones which could illustrate a short story by Borges and a Pink Floyd album and, in fact, the interpretation of these pictures given by author Giorgio Calcagno in the catalogue of the exhibition at the Centrarte Falanto gallery in Brindisi is conventionally literary.
The most intriguing painting in the exhibition (the only one which appears in the catalogue) is Telex, where the incipit of St John's Gospel is transliterated into the code of teleprinters. Not without irony, the artist combines visual languages only apparently distant from one another: from the codified writing of conceptual art to the piano score, from informatics to the medieval illuminated manuscripts. A painting like Arena represents an interesting link with his later production as it combines the metaphysical tone of this phase with the formal synthesis that will characterize his last period.
In those years Profumo also began a new activity. He cooperated with Monuments and Fine Arts Offices and Architecture firms, planning the colours of single buildings as well as entire urban areas (his most productive collaboration was with architect Bernardetta Melzi di Cusano).
The most important of these collaborations, owing to its complexity, was the colour plan for the fishermen's village of the Isola Piana in Sardinia carried out at the end of the seventies. While the paintings of the first half of the decade were multi-coloured landscapes of the mind, Profumo could now use the landscape itself as his canvas and experiment with the natural ever-changing light.
