Painting Color's Expanse, Umberto Nigi's first Solo Exhibition here in Philadelphia and the United States, is an organic-abstract extravaganza. Italian born, now residing in Belo Horizonte, Brasil, Umberto has exhibited both in Europe, Egypt and South America, most recently 2010 at Galleria Berenice Arvani in Sao Paulo, Brasil.
Itinerant as a homesteader, dwelling in the Mediterranean and Middle East - Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Jordan, the melding of culture and color has been inescapable. The results are dramatic organic chromatic abstract renderings, seemingly multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-emotional filters through which Nigi has extracted universally accepted forms of visual communication. In turn, synthesized, synergized and stratified we experience a translated reclamation of light through Nigi's experientially calibrated spectrometer.
Formally an engineer, a self taught painter, Nigi having an affinity for paintings by deceased Russian-born painter Mark Rothko, has dedicated this body of work to investigating the emotional, psycho ... of color's expansive iterance. Setting aside the notable and acclaimed deformative figurative work of his youth, Nigi's Rothko-esque investigations, unanchored colors floating within colors, fly in the face of the entrenched traditions of his native Tuscany.
Nigi's keen organic sensibilities combat the onslaught of present day technology. His compositions or lack thereof, challenge the rigors of convention. Repetitive overlaying color within color - object with field; iteration as if color were word and symbol. His intriguing floating tapestsry-esque wall coverings become chromatic portals. Often painting out to the edge of flat un-stretched canvas, Nigi's presentation lends itself to alternative means of hanging.