Antonio Fomez

Antonio Fomez is an Italian painter known for his abstract works that explore color and form. He was born in Portici, Naples, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples before moving to Milan. In Milan, he continued his studies and began to develop his unique style, which combines elements of geometric abstraction and expressionism.
There is a strongly conceptual component to Fomez’s work. In the early 1960s, he was perhaps the first in Italy to develop his own Pop language, drawing from period magazines, early advertisements, comic books, Panini stickers, and reproductions from Masters of Color (Fabbri ed.), the first major effort to widely disseminate artistic imagery.
Fomez literally transfers the image from one context to another, adopting a technique as close as possible to that of his sources, working through citation and accumulation, juxtaposition and transposition… It is a radical choice—among the most extreme, from a specifically pictorial standpoint—in the Italian art scene of those years.
In the following years, he focused particularly on the decontextualization of iconic images from art history, creating series dedicated to Bruegel, Courbet, Velázquez, Picasso, and also the 17th-century Neapolitan still life (Ruoppolo, Recco), as well as Rosso Fiorentino.
Fomez’s paintings are characterized by bold colors and dynamic forms, often arranged in complex compositions that convey a sense of movement and energy. He has exhibited his work in galleries and museums throughout Italy and Europe, and his art has been included in many important contemporary art exhibitions.