Dalla trasparenza alla materia.
(Di)segni della Scuola di San Lorenzo
per un ritorno alla pittura a Roma
tra fine anni Settanta e
primi anni Ottanta del Novecento
Livia de Pinto
In the city of Rome, the events that characterized the activity of seven artists identified as the Scuola di San Lorenzo have been particularly significant in a time frame that witnessed the social failure of the Avant-garde’s ideals, and a “state of crisis” of the art. Starting from the second half of the Seventies, this condition gradually resolved in a general return to the physicality of the work of art and the use of traditional media. Domenico Bianchi, Bruno Ceccobelli, Gianni Dessì, Giuseppe Gallo, Nunzio Di Stefano, Piero Pizzi Cannella and Marco Tirelli were trained in the roman conceptual art field of the mid-Seventies, and all
of them rediscovered the materiality of the work of art according to a traditional manual approach. Also thanks to a series of unpublished interviews and archival material supplied by the artists, the article aims to
analyse a group of explanatory drawings of the crucial transitional phase in which they felt the need to put new confidence in the graphic technique, looking for a way to a return to painting and sculpture.