Early life

Nuvolo was born on October 12, 1926, in Città di Castello, one of the major centers for typographic industry in Italy. His parents involved him in their printing workshop early in his life. The nickname “Nuvolo” (cloud) was given to him during the Second World War, when as teenage partisan his peers compared his quick appearances to a sudden cloud in the sky.^[1]

As a young artisan in the first years after the war, he soon showed manual dexterity in various fields, from decoration to set design, and gradually he focused his attention on silkscreen and its potential uses, working either in his family workshop or at the local graphic arts school, where he found teachers who fostered his disposition toward exploration.^[2]

In Rome with Alberto Burri

In 1949, Nuvolo moved to Rome, at the suggestion of his friend and fellow countryman Alberto Burri. Nuvolo primarily became Burri's collaborator at his Via Margutta studio, matching his work as an advertising artist with a first series of screen printing, the first foray into the field of visual arts.

Although silk screen tools were very poor at the times, he was the first in Italy, to adopt this technique for artistic goals. He created abstract figures by silk screen, utilizing dichromate gel, adopted from the rotogravure printing technique.^[3]

If in such graphic experiments he was initially influenced by his friend's matter research, Nuvolo would soon find his own creative autonomy in this medium as an innovator himself.

The “informal” climate

Working as an aid for Burri, Nuvolo got more and more in touch with a group of informal painting artists who characterized that decade. He associated with the (short lived) "Gruppo Origine", founded between 1949 and 1950 and formed by Corrado Cagli, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Mario Balocco, Ettore Colla and Burri himself, sharing an interest for new materials to connect to painting and a progressive departure from the use of paintbrush.

The “serotipie”

Around the middle of the Fifties, the quality of silk screens improved and helped Nuvolo to achieve new results in terms of printing and graphic experimentation: in 1954, “Arti Visive”, innovative art journal (alternitavely directed by Ettore Colla and by poet and Biblicist Emilio Villa along with his brother Ascanio Ascani), displayed his first official works on its covers and within its pages.^[4]

The name “Serotipie” was coined by Emilio Villa, who found a new artistic meaning for the silk screen abstract works, not intending them as reproduction series but unique printing works, made by an industrial tool and elaborated by acrylic and other materials.^[5] Interested on the role of causality in arts, similar to Pollock’s dripping, and focusing on various fields like physic, astronomy and mathematics, Nuvolo gave a new status to silk screen tool and its artistic potential.^[6]

Silk screen paintings and collages

In 1956 Nuvolo married Liana Baracchi and together they organized an atelier for graphic arts which flourished for more than fifty years, first in Rome and then moving to his native Città di Castello in the Early Eighties. Silk screen printing became the starting point for a vast array of artistic applications extending into many different fields over the years such as weaving, graphic arts, digital graphics and video art, considered by the author as a private field of research and expression, more than as elements for the marketing of art. As the critic Bruno Corà wrote, “the Mondrian and Burri lesson found Nuvolo as exponent of principles so able to create an additional zone of poetic sensibility between the Cartesian rigor of the Dutch and the epic and dramatic nature of the Italian”.^[7]

Sewing machine production

Applying a small motor to a simple Vigorelli sewing machine, Nuvolo started a new cycle of spatial construction in the early 1960s. Textiles and fabrics led to unexpected geometric solutions “mixing – as the critic Gillo Dorfles wrote – the precedent experiences of Patchwork and Ready Made”^[8] in the series “Tensioni” (Tensions), “Diagrammi” (Diagrams) and “Daini” (Deers).

New frontiers in serigraphy

In the decade from 1967 to 1977, the formal conjunctions of the “Oigrog” series,(with the anagrammatic title of the artist's name “Giorgio”), established a new serigraphic series based on the principles of fluid mechanics. The author used nitro colors giving life to psychedelic figures “simultaneously archetypical and android, as a last dynasty of golems produced by arts”.^[9] The “Modulari” of 1969/1971 defined a new dynamic progression in symmetrical secularity of photographs created with silk screen.

Digital production

A new formal concept based on vector mathematics was introduced to Nuvolo by the developing of Informatics in the early Eighties, supported by his sons Giorgio, photographer and Paolo, computer technician.^[10] In “Alpha 39” (1987/89) series he used binary code, forging a scientific approach which led to the “Aftermandelbrot” series (1989/1992), following the fractal theories of Benoît Mandelbrot forcing it through a combination of “guided errors”, deviations to the formula by computer, which created a proliferation of images by colors related to numerical values.^[11]

This computer graphics production led to the work created in the Nineties with the cycles of “Circuiti” (Circuits), “Dittici e Trittici” (Diptychs and Triptychs), “Enantiomorfi” (Enantiomorphs), “Omogeni”, until the last “Turbolenze” (Turbulences) of 1998 and “Legni Collage” (Wood collage) of 2002. The various applications of the “Genesi” (Genesis) cycle, started around 1994, which combined a particular manual intervention and a deeply pondered dialogue with video and sound based on the symphonies of Bach.