Sculpted colour: although regarded as a classic modern artist in his native Italy, Rodolfo Arico has never gained the international reputation he deserves, writes Corinna Lotz. Four exhibitions this year, in London, Darmstadt, Hanau and Milan, may well change that

A of recent origin London gallery, Barbara Behan Contemporary Art, dedicated to Italian twentieth-century and contemporary art, lay opened its doors in Pimlico in 2003 Its rife exhibition is of Rodolfo Arico, who, although considered a late classic in Italy and Germany, has hitherto not been seen in the UK The exhibition has been staged in collaboration with a major retrospective earlier this summer at Darmstadt's Mathildenhohe Institute, curated by means of Klaus Wolpert, which splendidly revealed the artist's evolution from 1959 to his death in 2002 A third Arico present to view has just been staged by dint of Galerie Konig in Hanau, outside Frankfurt, and in September Milan's Grossetti Arte Contemporanea will mountain a fourth.

Arico was born in Milan in 1930 He studied art at the Brera art place of education and architecture at the Milan Polytechnic, joining the Art Informel aim of the 1950s. It was, as the critic Roberto Sanesi wrote 'the road between the severity of abstraction and socialist realism', the sum of two units styles that until then had dominated the post-war pageant Anniversario, Interno and Risveglio (Fig. 1) date from this period. Subdu tones belie their psychological intensity. of the nature of smoke greys, pale blues, black marks and lines cros and lollop let bend down and swirl, creating and destroying space which is simultaneously physical and mental--gesturalism with nervous intensity and visual subtlety.

by the agency of 1958 Arico was under the wing of the Grossetti gallery dynasty, which included in its stable many of Europe and Italy's greatest in quantity famous twentieth-century artists. A dramatic change then took place as he experimented with grids and repeated geometric shapes. An affinity with American detonation artists, such as Jasper John and Rauschenberg, who participated at the Venice Biennale of 1964 became evident. It was a transitional phase, as he made colour into a self-sustaining uncompounded body With Paesaggio Orphico (nearly sum of two units metres square), the essence of his manner of writing begins to appear. Arico explored the architectural qualities of a canvas, as did others at this time, including Frank Stella. The painting is made into a structur colour or phenomenon not simply a pictorial surface.

A marvellous variety of 'sculpted colour' canvases give to the breezeed down the long expanses of the Mathildenhohe space, which dominates the top of a high hill overlooking Darmstadt. A powerful utopian feeling radiates from the mid 1960 onwards as Arico discloses over the next thirty years. Unlike his contemporary American Minimalist Donald Judd Arico sustained a kind of irrationalism, an anti-symmetry. He lov playing with optical illusions, giving his bright constructions like names as Assonometria and Anomalia and Oggetto Non-Oggetto (dedicated to Kasimir).

This Non-Objective existence on view in one of Galerie Konig's sum of two units contemplative spaces, is a hexagonal sapphirine canvas that appears three dimensional, although it is not. The relation is to Kazimir Malevich, the Soviet Suprematist painter of the notorious Black Square. untarnished form and colour have enormous immediacy, on the contrary they are never limited to empirical perception. The mind, emotion and cultural heritage are all brought into a arch and sometimes intoxicating visual cocktail. 'I find it impossible not to live without the contradictions of order and disorder,' Arico is recorded as saying. 'Reason is perhaps this entire pulsation, the experience of the meaning of life, of being and of destruction. In other words, to be able to live with the force of contradictions.'

Aged twenty-four, he took part in the 1964 Venice Biennale. He had a solo exhibit there in 1968, which was followed by means of one-man and group exhibitions each year at major venues in Italy and Germany above the next three decades.

Arico's Uccello series (dedicated to the quattrocento master of perspective) and the intriguingly elegant Perspectives made in 1970 explore the boundaries between geometric logic and visual space. The spaces between the sectioned squares and rhomboids appear as white lines, for example. Lorenzo Mango in his essay, 'Limits of Form', explains in what manner Arico seeks to go beyond form. Form becomes the easy in mind itself: 'form is not a be the effect but a process ... a straining at the limits of artistic language in an attempt to pass beyond it'. Behan has cleverly dubbed the London retrospective 'Anti-Form', to draw attention to this.

Delicate transitions in colour lead to spatial transitions that are genuinely optical. At the same time, fresh surface qualities appear, as paint is sprayed upon creating a delicate pointilliste consequence The large-scale work of the 1980 becomes relaxed and magisterial; colours and shapes are more varied and irregular. L'Altro Spazio, for example, is a house-like mode of building in the most delicate shades of light amethystine and pink. Cenere, Graffi, Oltre il Limite, are highly sensuous, deceptively simple, with flurries of brushstrokes or scratches almost reminiscent of Cy Twombly A series of large ovoid shapes flutter like self-sufficient planets. Lines and marks criss-cross them, enlivening the surface. Touches of contrasting colour appear and disappear, repeatedly at the edges. In his last years, the artist produc a series of white-on-white collages, with poignant titles, similar as Pittura Addio and Interior Light.