Last Tuesday, Zaza Calzia, an artist born in Cagliari in 1932, passed away in Rome. With her, one of the most significant figures of contemporary Sardinian art, a talent who was able to cross genres, techniques and languages with inexhaustible creative energy, has passed away. Trained at the Art Institute of Sassari under the guidance of Mauro Manca, "Calzia was among the protagonists of Gruppo A, a hotbed of experimentation that, together with Studio 58 in Cagliari, renewed the artistic scene on the island in the post-war period", says art critic Efisio Carbone.

The first exhibitions, such as the one in 1966 at the Galleria A in Sassari, were greeted with enthusiasm: his informal, material works, made of “dazzling lacerations and anguished storms of shadow” (Naitza, 1983), already marked an autonomous and profound research path. In the 1980s the language became even more personal: collage became the protagonist, uniting painting and sign in an unmistakable visual code. Letters cut from magazines overlapped with vibrant backgrounds, giving life to works that spoke the language of jazz: rhythm, improvisation, freedom.

«In 1987, the exhibition at the Galleria L'Ariete in Rome confirmed his success, confirming his ability to reinvent painting with astonishing power and compositional certainty. Thousands of letters of varying sizes covered the canvases, creating dancing forms in which to lose one's mind and heart», explains Carbone. «Collage increasingly proposed itself as the leading language in painting, to the point of invading the surface in every possible space with infinite characters in different scales, all coming from the same magazine: Pop culture dissected and de-structured towards the sublimation that is pure rhythm. In the 1990s, his research evolved further: the “Lettres découpées” became symbols of an aesthetic writing that evoked music and poetry. His work, light and powerful, full of irony and awareness, anticipated many contemporary experiments».

Zaza Calzia has crossed art with passion, without compromises, leaving us a legacy of expressive freedom and creative rigor. Sardinia, and not only, has the duty to rediscover her, celebrate her and give her back the place she deserves in the history of art of the Second Post-War period.

Francis Abbot

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