Quadrato in evoluzione

Within this small painting, there unfolds a vast, practically incommensurable space; wafted towards an indefinite “beyond” – one might say – by the mad swirling of a propeller, almost the only note of loud, bright colour in a sea of whites and greys, that revolves at the centre of the composition, as if gathering in and driving in all directions the feeble breath of breeze that turns it.
Now, in the mid-1960s, Novelli is at the height of his powers, in the brief maturity of his art. After prolonged questing between neo-concretist abstraction and late-Informalist material painting, he liberated his imagination just by transgressing the laws of rationality, which he sensed was paralyzing: “What comes from my hands is much simpler than logic and reason”, he would write. And on the path of destructured logic that calls everything into question – here, as the title of this “Square in evolution” says, the rigour of the geometric figure – Novelli, adopting the best of the Dadaist “folly” and working with the Roman artistic quest of the decade, with his friends and fellow artists Perilli and Twombly, he found his own language, in a sea of absence and void just barely commented upon by shards of dream and memory.