Piero Dorazio

Still very young, Dorazio entered the Roman artistic circles in the mid forties. After a brief apprenticeship under the guidance of Renato Guttuso, the artist turns to a meditation on the expressive novelties attributable to the avant-gardes, and then takes the path of pictorial abstraction: this will become one of the most important exponents at international level. In 1947, together with Accardi, Attardi, Consagra, Guerrini, Perilli, Sanfilippo and Turcato he signed the manifesto of the Forma 1 group, where the artists declared themselves promoters of a pictorial expression that focuses on the pure relationships between form and color, and thus takes leave from naturalistic data. The compositional rigor, the inclination towards the tonal values ​​of color, the interest in the phenomenology of perception, bring his work first in proximity to the concretist research, then to those that, since the beginning of the sixties, are collected under the sign of the New Trend. The reflection on the relationship between image and thought represents a constant in his research, whose contribution to the cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century must be measured not only on the artistic level, but also on the purely intellectual one. Parade, painted in 1965, highlights the rhythmic and spatial value of Dorazio's painting. The work is contextual to a period considered one of the happiest of his creativity, due to the "surprising intensity" (Dorfles) of his textures made of sign, light, color.