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Long thin strips of paper, previously doused in harmonious colours (the tones employed are ochre tending to light blue and to grey), are placed in a paratactical series on the small surface area: simple geometrical “quantities”, which seem foreign to any desire to find impetus, passion, or cries from the heart – as had long been the case in Scialoja’s work.
In the 1970s, a serious doubt crossed his mind as to the legitimacy of the artist abandoning or confessing himself on the canvas by means of gesture – a technique that he had greatly loved in the early period of his mature work. The geometrical quantities of the reticent works of these years, often emphasized by recourse to the use of collage, are basically the heirs of the earlier imprints – instants when the event was isolated, consigned to time and to memory, in a sequence spreading across the surface. But it is as if a paralysing doubt or suspicion of gratuitousness had descended on his work. Then, in 1979, in a page of the Giornale di pittura he referred to his desire “to return to the gesture, the single gesture, the grand automatic gesture that cancels negation”. Then the geometric cuttings that made up the collages were marked by newly liberated, newly abandoned intentions. This was a recovery of the contented blindness of years past, which in fact began with this 1979 work, and which was fully developed in the early 1980s, remaining intact until his death in 1998.