Sergio Romiti (Bologna 1928 - Bologna 2000)

Sergio Romiti was born in Bologna in 1928 and spent his entire life there, in a condition of isolation that he increasingly and stubbornly pursued over time, and was accordingly likened to Morandi. In reality, just like Morandi, as a young man in the 1950s and during his early adulthood, he was attentive to Italian questions (at the time he was seconded, among others, by Francesco Arcangeli, who presented Romiti’s first solo show in 1951 at the Milione Gallery in Milan, and who called on him to join the ranks of the “last naturalists”). But he did not neglect the European art scene either, especially in France (that same year he exhibited in Paris, followed by a major personal exhibition in 1952).
Romiti soon moved away from the post-cubist culture, where he had started out: he looked first to Nicolas De Staël, then to Tal-Coat’s rarefied sign, gently floating in space. To the suggestions of Tal-Coat, Romiti would add a profound attunement to the image of the most extreme Morandi, while gradually distancing himself from the informal materialism of many of the “last naturalists” and of Morlotti in particular. Beginning in 1952, he exhibited regularly at the Venice Biennale, where in 1960 his paintings occupied an entire room and were presented by Marco Valsecchi; his work was also shown at many editions of the Peintres d’aujourd’hui France-Italie in Turin, and the international exhibitions of Pittsburgh.
In the 1960s, in pursuit of a relationship with photography and cinema, he abandoned the tenuous and tonally harmonious chromatic range that was his signature, gradually turning to the sharper dialogue of black and white, shattered by a violent, almost hostile energy.
He took his own life in Bologna in 2000.