Romolo Calciati

For him, nothing is ever fully acquired, whether conceptually or in practice. Every certainty is openly questioned, every formulation overturned and reconstructed within that kaleidoscopic mechanism where his iconemes are set in motion. These elements, which form the mental hypothesis of an image to be conveyed onto paper or canvas as a topographically varied vision […] are the equivalent of phonemes that shift in meaning and “weight” depending on how a sentence is constructed. A sentence that is never destroyed, yet never completed, due to the immeasurable number of possible combinations. His approach—erudite and playful, scientific and subversive—shares certain methodological affinities with that applied by Raymond Queneau in Cent mille milliards de poèmes.

Luciano Caprile (1996)

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Romolo Calciati believes in the vitality of the painterly gesture, in the expressive power of the graphic mark, which he considers its very foundation. He has also ventured into recent explorations of the image as it emerges from the digital logic of the computer. Over the course of forty years, he has thus given shape to an imaginary cosmos of surprising complexity.

Philippe Daverio (2002)

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As early as the 1950s, Calciati had sparked an unexpected dialogue between the citation of pointillist technique and its sublimation into an explosive poetics of abstract fragmentation.

Franco Fanelli (2001)

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All of Romolo Calciati’s works possess an unusual lightness, which they retain even when evoking the monsters that haunt the metropolis or exploring unsettling, shadowy places. What prevails is the element of free play – from which arise the ceaseless proliferation of forms and new languages, the endless recombination of archetypes and modules.

Eleonora Fiorani (2002)

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Calciati’s paintings confront us with the ultimate question of the relationship between reason and probability – specifically, between art and chance.

Ruggero Orlando (1968)

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For Calciati, painting is the occasion – the privileged means – for a great adventure along roads and paths that run parallel and intertwine in spatial and temporal stratifications, touching upon the crucial nodes of both historical and natural existence.

Francesco Poli (1993)