Pietra miliare

A white fire occupies the centre of the image, a ghostlike apparition in the pall of greys and ochres. But everything has become a blur by now: the forms, no longer confined by the drawing, have been reduced to ”pulsating bodies woven from light and graphic rhythms,” as Nello Ponente wrote when presenting the 21 works from these years that hung in the vast room dedicated to the artist in the Venice Biennale of 1960. Forms that appeared to dissolve in the magma of a drowsy colour, lost by now in the light that slowly invaded the composition, while a vigorous, rapid handwriting emerges clearly from that ulcerated material.
As the 1950s came to an end, the painter moved close to an Informalist notion not unlike the formulation given it by Michel Tapié, of an “art autre”, which aimed to overcome the usual practices of abstract art but also the proud materiality of a certain northern Italian Informalist style, pouring both into a quest for the sign that, like a divining rod, pursues the truth. What Corpora was pursuing at that time was an ”Informalist heterodoxy” – as Cesare Vivaldi aptly defined it – not far removed from the contemporary quest of other artists, be they French (in the footprints of the last Wols) or Italian, grouped around Achille Perilli in the review L’esperienza moderna, published in Rome from 1957 to 1959.