A graduate in English language and literature, Lattanzi lived from the mid-1950s on between London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. It was in this last city where he began to paint, becoming interested in the Informale artistic environment. Particularly attracted by Jackson Pollock’s work, Lattanzi explored the relationship between "gesture" – understood as a pure, simple act typical of American Action Painting – and "material", as a preferred expressive means in the European Arte Informale. Lattanzi identified in gesture and material the essential elements of ornament from which he produced a type of painting that he called Semantica – namely, a non-hierarchical organization of essential, interacting parts in whose internal dynamics, each element, gesture, mark, and spot of color is neither inferior nor superior to the other. From these principles, Lattanzi wrote the Manifesto of Semantic Painting in 1957 in London. This was followed in 1961 by the Secondo Manifesto Semantico (Second Semantic Manifesto), written together with Werner Schreib in Frankfurt. He later published Annotazioni sulla Pittura Semantica, (Siena, Ed. Maia, 1961), La Peinture Sémantique (Paris, Ed. Le Prat, 1962). He alternated his theoretical texts with a series of personal exhibitions that included New Vision Gallery, London, 1957; Galleria Numero, Florence, 1957; Galérie Fürstemberg, Paris, 1958; Galleria Prisma, Milan, 1959; University Gallery, Minneapolis (USA), 1960; Drian Gallery, London, 1961; Galerie Brusberg, Hannover, 1966; and Galérie Falchetti, Parigi, 1967. In those same years, he participated in numerous collective exhibitions: Mostra Arte Toscana, Florence, 1959; national exhibition, La Spezia, 1960; Internationale Malerei, Wolframs-Escenbach, 1961; Pittura Contemporanea, Milan, 1962; L’Art et l'Écriture, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdan and Staatliche Kunstalle, Baden-Baden, 1963; XXXII Venice Biennale, Venice, 1964; International Biennial of La Gravure, Ljubljana, 1965; Salon D'Automme, Paris, 1966; Werke der 1st Internationalen Malerwochen auf Schloss Retzhof bei Leibnitz, Graz, 1966; Figuration Critique 1989, Grand Palais, Paris. In the 1970s and 1980s, the artist further developed this ornamental theme to which were joined mystical-symbolic elements similar to the style of the painter Werner Schreib’s, on one hand, and the desire, on the other, for intellectual dominion over the form i.e., specifically that of Robert Estivals and Schematism.
(Semantic Images) "Lattanzi's semantic painting emerged from the clods turned over again by the plow of Action Painting, from which the Carrara painter recaptured the basic gesture for other expressive purposes" (cf. G. Di Genova, Storia dell’Arte Italiana del ’900. Generazione anni Venti, Vol. 4, Bologna 1991, p.175). This painting genre had been theorized at the beginning of the 1960s by Luciano Lattanzi and Werner Schreib, who noted the well-known crisis of the informal artistic language. Starting from this observation, a new type of communication was sought that abandoned itself to the unconscious impulse from which various kinds of fragments, mainly signs, emerged. In these early years of theoretical development, the Tuscan artist’s work was already embarked on a clear decorativism. Translated into personal transcriptions based on a series of marks that he had intentionally called "basic gestures", they are characterized by a subtly meticulous tendency to give predominance to graphic elements suitable to revealing the artist’s physical and sensitive presence. In Immagini Semantiche, a graphic work from 1961, the space is divided into four sectors, each of which preserves an intimate form triggered by a real psychic automatism of surrealist derivation. Enclosed within a contour line, the images are the result of a spontaneous creation re-emerging from the "rational foundation of the unconscious" (as defined by Lattanzi), in which all the signs and gestures belonging to the human universe are held.
mm 350x500
(Semantic Configuration) Luciano Lattanzi’s decorative sense is even more evident in his etchings. In Configurazione Semantica from 1978, the work’s space is saturated by an agglomeration of elements extrapolated from a vast iconographic repertoire: free signs, squares, horizontal and vertical lines, zigzags, spirals, curves, circles, wheels, and ocher- to copper-colored glazings. In his analysis of these works, Will Grohmann discovered a Byzantine taste in Lattanzi’s form-images. instead, Giorgio Di Genova observed a link with oriental fabrics in the ornamental variations. However, it was Gerard Gassiot-Talbot who observed that, beyond the similitudes, the internal dynamics from which a semantic work springs are “[t]he combination of basic gestures – even if going so far as to erect strange buildings in which baroque movements or fantastic iconographies can be gleaned – never proceeds by a clear organizing design, but rather by an automatic connection, a sort of discharge, or perpetual interweaving "(cf. G. Gassiot-Talbot, in Lattanzi e Schreib, Rome 1964, p.22).
mm 500x400