Gianni Bertini

Painting as invention: a modernism built on signs, surfaces and visual rhythm

A singular voice within the European post-war avant-garde, Gianni Bertini (1922–2010) forged an artistic language in which painting becomes a laboratory of signs, materials and visual traces. Born in Pisa and active between Italy and France, he belongs to a generation determined to move beyond the traditional boundary between abstraction, figuration and the visual vocabulary of modern life.

What sets Bertini apart is not adherence to a school or movement, but a method: observing how images circulate within the contemporary world, then translating that pulse onto the surface of the work. From the early 1950s, he experiments with mixed processes: collage, stencilling, modular constructions, to develop a personal lexicon that shifts between geometric discipline, gestural spontaneity and fragments drawn from everyday reality.

During this formative decade, as Europe rebuilds its visual identity, Bertini creates compositions that are austere, precise and unmistakably modern, often resonating with a reimagined form of post-cubism. These rare works echo the formal explorations taking place in France at the time: from the late School of Paris to the structural clarity of Fernand Léger.

From the 1960s onward, Bertini’s practice opens to more experimental forms, incorporating photography, typography and early strategies of image appropriation. In doing so, he anticipates concerns that would become central to conceptual and image-based art in the decades that followed.

Today, Gianni Bertini’s œuvre stands as that of a bridge-builder: between abstraction and the visual systems of modern life, between painting and the signs that organise our perception. Independent of official schools, his work asserts a vision that remains strikingly relevant: rigorous, inventive, and continually attuned to the rhythms of the contemporary world.