Thursday 25 May, at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art pays tribute to the great collector Tommaso Fontana by exhibiting a selection of works by the artist Mario Nigro, belonging to his historic collection, in the exhibition Tommaso Fontana – Mario Nigro. Uniqueness and rigour.

Here are the words of the art critic Giuseppe Appella in reference to the exhibition: "A balanced relationship between individual and universal, unconscious and conscious, immutable and changeable, the conviction that «the purely plastic way of seeing must build a new society, as created a new representation of art», are at the origin of the long meditation of Mondrian's neoplastic thought, of Mario Nigro's experiences in the field of total space and total time, of the maturation of Tommaso Fontana as a collector who, divided between Fontana and Capogrossi, Albers and Burri, Max Bill and Castellani, Magnelli and Hartung, Pistoletto and Paolini, in the end he chooses Nigro to escape any misunderstanding of interpretation and evaluation of the work of art”.

A difficult choice, only if one thinks of the slow and progressive journey of Nigro from naturalism to the barest abstraction, and of the quality of this journey which, precisely in the year in which Tommaso Fontana indicates the beginning of the collection of his friend's works (Abstract Composition, 1949), never excludes the total presence of man determined towards a search for plastic purity through the reduction of means to the simple manifestation of relationships based on ascending lines that intersect at right or acute angles and banish the curved line , the spatial illusion and every reference to the impressionist and expressionist technique (Construction, 1951). However, without slipping into the mystical recognition of the absolute or making a tabula rasa of the world of appearances which are rigorously conveyed, as immediate vehicles of thought, on the flat surface of the canvas or paper ready to welcome, in an asymmetrical balance, the dynamic relationship between time and space.

The horizontal-vertical of Mondrian becomes the vertical-oblique of Nigro who rediscovers the horizon only at the end of his life, when the reserve, solitude and exaltation that accompanied him for decades find a perfect unity in the measure and freedom of a neoplastic datum without compromises, where the purification and deepening of sensible reality is affirmed.