2025 Poster Session

Licio Isolani (1931-2015) is an understudied Italian artist who belonged to the avant-garde generation working in New York City between the 1950’s-60’s. Inspired by Boccioni and Bala’s Futurist call for “a New form for a New World” they were actively engaged in the search for new art materials to express their ideas in a new more personal way. Based on the dating of his paintings, Isolani was conducting “recycled and found materials" research at the same time as Robert Rauschenberg and Alberto Burri, and he was looking for materials that could give the new luminosity of Lucio Fontana. The variety of materials used by the many artists of this generation needs further scientific investigation, and thus the study of Isolani’s works also sheds further light into this stunningly innovative generation of artists.

Licio Isolani donated his early art collection (1957-1969) to Pratt Institute in 2015. Within this collection several sculptures bear resemblances to contemporary or earlier paintings. The two-dimensional subjects are brought to life in a colored fiberglass polyester resin sculptures. These sculptures gave Isolani the opportunity to work with angles and different forms that interact with light in a new way, a topic he writes extensively about in his diaries. 

Both the paintings and sculptures of this period show areas of high opacity juxtaposed with  translucency and are meant to be illuminated. His paintings are executed on aluminum gilded supports that create a reflective painting surface giving the illusion of an open space which is framed by the non-reflective highly opaque painted areas. 

As a preliminary investigation, a representative painting and sculpture depicting similar subjects and colors dating to c.1962 were chosen for non-invasive, in-situ X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis.

The results indicate that the main source of “translucent” pigments in the painting are given by ground metals: Aluminum, Copper, Tin and Zinc, along with the use of the “highly opaque”  Lead and Chrome-based reds and yellows, titanium and lead white and Phosphorus-containing blacks for the non-reflective areas. Chlorine was detected uniformly throughout the painting but the nature of its presence is not yet understood and is under further investigation. The XRF studies of the fiberglass sculpture showed that Isolani achieved translucency vs opacity effects by in his sculptures using Lead and Chromium-based red and yellow pigments, Phosphorus and Carbon-containing blacks and organic dyes, either embedded in the resin or painted. The presence of dyes is inferred due to the lack of inorganic chromophores on the translucent regions of the sculpture. Not all yellows and reds display a significant Chromium signal, as in the painting, suggesting the possible presence of Lead red and/or red organic dyes. Areas of high opacity also show the presence of high-density fiberglass suggested by the high intensity of Silicon and Calcium in the XRF spectra, whereas transparent areas are mainly composed of dyed polyester resin and low-density fiberglass (low Silicon and Calcium signals and the absence of an inorganic chromophore). This preliminary XRF study shows the complexity and variety of materials Isolani experimented with in his search for obtaining new luminosity, color and shapes in his sculptures and the illusion of three dimensions in his paintings.