Keywords

• Up to now historical study has thoroughly investigated the cultural background and the early professional biography of the five painters Achille Bonito Oliva has included in the Transavant-garde (Sandro Chiaia
• Francesco Clemente
• Enzo Cucchi
• Nicola de Maria and Mimmo Paladino) yet. The main obstacles to this study goes back to the birth of Transavant-garde. From one side
• the documents concerning the past of the artists that would not justify the belated rehabilitation of the traditional media were suddenly not taken into account
• and from the other side
• it emerged a clear and schematic contrast between the Transavant- garde and the preceding experiences of the Arte Povera (Poor Art) and Conceptual Art through which the militant criticism interpreted this shift
• the historians are still dealing with. The essay focuses on the story of the two transavant-gardists
• Paladino and de Maria
• with the aim of reconstructing how they join from the end of the sixties to 1977
• the "Environment-painting"
• a form of expanded and wall painting considered a preliminary step to the Transavant- garde. The historical investigations have taken up again this corpus of documents
• intentionally ignored
• and have focused on the experimental beginnings of the two artists related to the environment
• the performance and in particular the photography. The essay therefore
• tries to give a more complex interpretation of this corpus compared with the contrast suggested by the militant criticism finding out the continuity elements of the painting
• or the pictorial iconography
• already existing in the Italian neo-avantgarde
• taken up by Paladino and de Maria