Following the definition process of the key idea within an artist’s oeuvre is an adventure that for Rodolfo Aricò can be experienced through this exhibition of his work.
After a first experience in the sphere of Art Informel, and subsequent approach to the work of Arshile Gorky and Robert Delaunay, Aricò undertook a process to objectivise painting which, in the second half of the 1960s, led to similar results to the experiments going on at that time across the Atlantic (from Post-Painterly Abstraction to Minimalism), but with wholly original characteristics. The specific feature of his work is the sensitivity of the colour alongside the rigour of a form that gradually takes shape on the canvas until it becomes a three-dimensional object (or “shaped canvas”) that seems to be expanding in space.
In Forma e campionario (1965) the brushwork, even if still vibrant, outlines a geometric shape designed   as modular element of repetition and change, and then gives rise to rhythmic isometric relationships (similar to Simultaneous Axonometry, 1965).The seriality of the implicit iteration of a form, is released slowly from the two-dimensionality of the canvas, looking for a preliminary expansion into space. In the four variants of Project Axonometric of 1967, in fact, the artist, painting uniformally the same rounded shape with colours ranging from white to green, tries to virtually give the painting more and more volume, as if to make it detached from the support. From here the idea of shaped canvases is a short step. Perspective (1969), Prospect red-green-blue (1971), Perspective blue (1971) and Tricromia (1972) are geometric-architectural constructions in which the emotion of colour, characteristic of his 1960s pieces, is completely filtered by the rationality of the form, to transform the painting into an “object” capable of making the objectivity of the structure correspond with the subjectivity of its perception.