Abstract
The author’s attention is on Renato De Fusco’s training and first
affirmation’s years, as a painter but also a theoretician: from his
exhibition activity with Gruppo Sud, a group of young artists who
gathered in 1947 around the magazine «Sud», directed by Pasquale Prunas to the “undeclared” presence in the drafting of the
manifesto of the “Neapolitan Secession of figurative and plastic
arts”, in the spring of the same year, to the personal exhibitions
at the end of the decade, to the foundation with Barisani, Tatafiore
and Venditti at the Gruppo Neapolitan of concrete art, in 1950,
up to the exhibition held at Medea gallery in Naples in 1954, and
the drafting of the declaration “Why concrete art”. It is a reflection on the dual commitment, as a painter and as a theoretician,
which spans a significant season of contemporary art in Naples,
with the direct participation of artists in the cultural debate recorded in Italy after the Second World War, marked by the comparison between realism and abstractionism. From the experiments of neorealist painting to the Matissian synthesis of sign
and color, to geometric abstraction, to the implications with architecture, to the theoretical contributions that reflect the climate
of those years.
