Among the most meaningful artists of the second half of the 20th century, Francesco Lo Savio (1935 – 1963) produced his works over a very short time span, terminating with his death at only twenty-eight years of age: a high-charged career, full of intuitions grasped only after his disappearance. In Passione dell’indifferenza. Francesco Lo Savio, the art historian Riccardo Venturi reconstructs the final years of the artist’s life in a narrative form, in a two-voice text. The first looks backwards, like a noir flashback, over the key episodes of Lo Savio’s life and work. We meet the artist in Rome at the deserted vernissage of his last solo show; we follow him to a hotel in Turin where he has an appointment with Pierre Restany; we accompany him in his tragic final gesture in Marseille, in a unité d’habitation designed by his great maestro Le Corbusier. The counterpoint to this voice is offered by a second one, a divining thought that reconstructs the artistic and human environment in which Lo Savio found himself living. Within the framework of the 1960s, he was boycotted in Milan by Fontana and Manzoni; acclaimed in Leverkusen amid Reinhardt and Verheyen; opposed in Rome by the artists of Caffè Rosati; and lastly watched over, throughout the last days of his life in Marseille, by his beloved Marianne and his brother Tano Festa.
The volume is completed with a profile on the work of Lo Savio. The publication fills a critical void on an artist who is ever more widely appreciated in Italy and throughout the world, published in the wake of the exhibition ‘Francesco Lo Savio’ at the Mart Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea of Trento and Rovereto.