An interactive show, based on the active relationship between the work of art and the audience, who sees the images change by moving in the space. Alberto Biasi [2], a refined artist rigorously trained in the application of optical illusions to art, has been the tireless force of experimental groups and innovative expositions.Soul and drive of the so-called “Gruppo N”, born in 1959 during a period of great cultural fertility.

We met with Maestro Biasi in the heart of Chelsea at the De Buck Gallery [3], the day after the successful opening. The artist came to New York after having held other shows in Europe and South America. He was tired but very happy with the reaction of the American audience.

Biasi’s aren’t traditional works of art. They’re objects, creations that educate on vision, create it, and make you see something you can’t see. 

You get this impression of movement and you want to ask: if the piece is perfectly still, how come I see it move? Is movement an illusion of the human mind? The Maestro began asking these questions since he was young, when “in the 60’s, vision and the education of vision was very different from today. Today we are hit by a mass of televised images, while in my day we were used to seeing in figure-ground perspective.” Biasi explains.

To understand the evolution of his artistic and cultural journey we have to venture into his life. Born in 1937, a tumultuous childhood due to the wartime atmosphere in Italy, and an inborn interest in the field of architecture and of those “shapes I called stratifications”. Between friends and colleagues, he wasn’t lacking in mentors, such as Gaetano Pesce [4], Agostino Bonalumi [5], and Piero Manzoni [6].

From a very young age, Alberto Biasi contested perspective, classical, academic vision, Ancient and Renaissance-era conceptions of the ‘40’s that “didn’t apply to those times”. 

The world that the artist represented and continues to represent is composed of different overlapping layers, unusual materials, and his earliest experiments even integrated perforated paper “which was used in silkworm breeding”.

The De Buck Gallery is a large and spacious space, immense grey walls against which the works of Biasi are like drops of optical-mental visions that aren’t really there, they don’t really exist. 

The appeal of this art, which looks easy but is anything but that, comes from the perception that forms between a structure created under and another created over it. “There’s an interference creating an optical illusion of round shapes that expand as we move” recounts the Maestro.

“Touching them with your eyes you feel as if you are participating in the creation of the work” he concludes. Our discussion over, Alberto Biasi takes us on an “illusionary tour” of his great pieces hung on the walls of the De Buck Gallery… it feels like being a child again, looking at a gigantic stereograms”. Biasi knew to look forward with innovation and experimentation at a time in which Italy was rising economically.