Profumo's pictorial research in the early sixties veered towards a dialectic growing beyond Informal Art. His new one-man exhibition at the “San Matteo” Art Gallery (Genoa,1962) and the travelling exhibition for the three branches of Fiamma Vigo's “Numero” Art Gallery (Florence, Rome, Venice 1966), exhibited non-figurative works. In these works the painted surface is now composed of a sort of geometrical jigsaw puzzle or irregular grid.

The pictorial matter is thick and coarse. The oil paint, spread with a palette knife, becomes tar, earth: this magmatic crust, derived from Informal art, contends with the rational straight lines that organize the canvas into precise colour zones according to the most rigorous traditions of abstract-concrete art. We find a further and more original visual dichotomy between the rusty, sallow, dull colours that form the upper layer of the paintings and the light, bright background which is almost completely smothered in the tar-like oil paint but tends to shine through, like a light. The result, which is very difficult to reproduce in a photo, is that these paintings look as if they were lit from behind. While the pictorial matter in the foreground of the canvas exists physically in the phenomenological space of the observer and is therefore linked to what exists in the physical world, the painted light on the background suggests a further space beyond it.

In Europe, in the post-war period, Informal Art was expressing a new need for a physicality, the search for a primordial creative gesture, a new start after the catastrophe of the war. Without denying this precedent, in the early sixties, Profumo took part in the new climate of research in and reconstruction of the sacredness of art which was also a reaction to the social changes and to the new lifestyle in the Italy of the “economic miracle”.

After a crisis which lasted two years (1966-1968) and during which he did no painting, Profumo moved to Rome and began work again. His return to figurative art coincided with his choice of bright, saturated colours similar to those of the new Pop Art but totally independent from it. Profumo painted neither advertising posters nor the new consumer symbols. He returned to representing landscapes but his vineyards and his olive trees look rather like plastic and, in a re-elaboration of the work of artists like Turcato, Sanfilippo or Accardi, become decorations, arabesques in various tonalities of the same colour.

Antologia critica