This is from an interview with the Maestro that we consider to be exhaustive for a first approach with his Art.

QUESTO BIANCO MI SOLLEVA
edited by Michele Caldarelli

Question: With regard to your artistic experience, wanting to begin a discussion starting with a formal analysis of your works, could you explain the reason for the total "white" and exclusive that you use?
Response: That of the "white" was not an experience begun only with my arrival in New York, it grew in time and naturally, without me even noticing. Still in Italy, I remember that in 1944-45 in Florence, I entered a church that, unlike the Baroque churches in Rome, it was a of a simplicity that I had never seen before, and, in addition, it was painted a greyish but warm white, with golden frames. This first visual experience of "white" stayed with me, and having returned to Rome, which presented itself in the landscapes that I was painting. In these, the sky often appeared with patches of white, but not intended as a colour variation; it was not a question of clouds which in the background one cannot tell if they are white or blue, but of "spaces" painted in white. This "white" mirrored itself in the landscape as well, alternating the vegetation and all the rest. But the most important thing is that then, being a figurative- abstract, I painted some crucifixions and the "white" stood out once again more naturally for the spirit of the subject. I painted Mary Magdalene and Christ completely, or almost completely white. The "white" expressed the her love toward Christ which was no longer an earthly love but a spiritual love

Q. Since your first encounter with "white" how has your partiality toward this non-colour, absence, spiritual transitus grown into being the absolute protagonists of your work and further, can we interpret your "white" as a reflection, mirror?
R. Yes, white reflects any colour, it tints itself; regarding space however, you cannot attribute ties since the mirror is an illusion of space. Initially the "white" was tied to the subject in question, complementary to this, then it became a support of itself, strength, without being tied to anything besides its own energy. First the "white" was also correlated to the other colours and therefore a colour in itself, later, absolved by the chromatic relationship it became a "space" tied to the idea of the infinite, free of relationships, "white" doesn't exist. The "white" in my works, then was not born from a cultural thrust, from having known before and through history who, how and why of having painted the first painting completely white. I found out about the white painting of Malevich only subsequently, the logic of the story entered my thinking later, in 1956-57. Naturally I know that history passes on culture and the wealth of knowledge but it is also true that if you exhaust yourself in the citation, you mean and you give nothing; you must add something to history in order to make it alive and continue. The first things I did without constructive knowledge, but with the sense of this "white" and used again not one but many colours even for the graphic. Precisely working with the print, in 1955, I obtained a completely white one which I still have. Later it was the abandoning of the frame of colours and of well-matured experience of the American abstract expressionism. The "white" appeared to me again without my looking for it, he presented himself to me. I remember that in Pennsylvania I saw a lake early in the morning. The water was evaporating, and the vapours and the waters united in a unique grey-white, separation no longer existed. Referring to this vision, I painted my first white painting and didn't think at all about Malevich. Then the white has never left me and colours slowly have disappeared from my palette and this "white" lifts me up and offers me ever more happiness in using it.

Q. In a "white" way you related even yourself to the support of the canvas, eliminating the frame, its perpendicularity and every one of its references of classic proportioning to this.
R. Yes, I eliminated the frame and the classicalness of the form: the "square". I elaborated irregular geometric forms giving continuity to the first white painting realised, that of Malevich.

Q. In many of your works there are homogeneous materials. Ropes, for example, give a value beyond formal, even symbolic, attributable to their wound and spiral structure? And the white?
R. I believe that these ropes make up the memory of my childhood, when I was always on the seashore. My hometown is located, on the rocky coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, facing Stromboli. But if, unaware, I referred to memory, my intention, in inserting the ropes in the composite space, was that of accompanying the eye, in an elliptical rhythm, from the bottom to the top of the work, and vice versa. Involving in this way, even the painted background placed to the left and to the right, this line traced from the rope constitutes an accent of the space, dividing it and uniting it at the same time. In these paintings, to which we are referring, space was not yet understood in the total sense, but was still tied to some actions. The rope, almost always oblique, enters and exits from the canvas surface involving, in its movement, even the internal space with that external. I have never given symbolic values to my works, because I think that symbol does not exist, in the absolute sense. Every culture has its own, and in the field of artistic impression, I find that we are limiting. The same "white", for example, has contrasting meanings for various people groups. If, in the classic portrayal, a symbolic character was attributed to the images, I find that these would result as more enchanting where the symbol remains definable as in Tiziano's "Amar sacro e Amor profano". Here it one can not conclude if the profane is the naked body or the dressed one, or vice-versa, and the interested in this painting continues.

Q. But if you affirm to not include symbolism, how do you justify the "mythical" sense that is suggested by the titles that you assign to you works?
R. The first time that I used a rope was in the realising of "Dante's Inferno" in 1964, placing it on the inside of vertical, box-shaped structures, travelling the fluting, visibly from the bottom to the top. I started out with the idea of raising a column from a platform placed in a basin of water; I wasn't contemplating the idea of the title. When I finished the work, with all of its 25 columns, I was living in Pennsylvania but had a studio in New York. One day Barnett Newman came with my wife to visit me, they saw the work and discussing it they asked me what title I wanted to give it, but they found me unprepared. In creating it I had only thought of studying the effect of the structures reflected in the water.
He suggested calling it Dante's Inferno to which I replied that it seemed pretentious to compare it to a book that powerful. Newman replied, bewildered, that I shouldn't worry about such thoughts, seeing that he himself had realised works essentially entitled The Passion of Christ without there being, among other things, any passion, or even less, Christ. The theme seemed tremendous and, thinking about all the characters that Dante placed in Hell, the desire flashed into my mind of wanting to, when I will travel toward that other dimension, go precisely there because I believe that even Dante ended up there, and I can also talk to Virgil, Socrates, Plato, Pythagora, and other great thinkers. So I also gave a name to every column, but only to distinguish them from each other. There are small ones as well as those nearly 4 meters high, of aluminium and the rope is fused in metal. Certainly it could be that, unconsciously, I had intended to evoke with names the "mystic" or "meditative" sense which is normal in my practice of Yoga which I have by now practised for many many years, but it remains ever extraneous to the artist's intention.

Q. For you, is the formal approach in step with the joint-ownership and the elusion of symbolism.
R. Yes, after eliminating the frame, I eliminated the variations between the various types of white and I used only one, that of titanium, the most intense. Then, having limited myself to only this white I felt the need to work further and dedicated myself to sculpture beginning with Dante's Inferno. When sculpture was no longer enough, I concentrated my attention on physical spaces and to making them come alive. I created one, for example, with some trunks at the Hutchison gallery on Green Street in New York. With around 84 trunks painted white, arranged according to the classic perspective but with an unusual perspective which disoriented the eye. There was no vanishing point and in the end I had placed a "sacred" tree, as all nature is sacred, which was the work's crowning moment.

Q. In the tree, allow me the symbol, "wood of life", could again be placed as the ideal "place of passing"?
R. Yes, in that time I was living in Pennsylvania on a large farm with a lot of space, in a type of farmhouse typical to that area, which has a very beautiful architecture. The view of the trees, bare due to winter and then gloriously green left me a profound impression on me. From there came my desire to use trunks for creating a never before seen nature. Even if the show whitens nature, it always leaves some emerging parts with their own colour and a nature completely enfolded in white, as I had wanted it, it has never existed, if not by my doing. Later I used many other materials, including plastic, since 1954, and especially in the latest works, milk-white Plexiglas

Q. Like the primordial milk sea of the Indian tradition? Should you allow me one final good-natured provocation.
R. As you wish, but I say again that as each metaphor or symbol is not a part of my artistic vocabulary, even though I wrote a poem about the breasts which with milk nourish the world. Even in the use of the oval, which I recently reintroduced, I wasn't trying to allude to the cosmic egg that generated the universe, as much as, in the formal elaboration, I simply want to escape from every reference from Cartesian space and to the harmonic configuration. All that happens in the painting's surface or in the prospective illusion has a symbolic value and therefore limits the artistic creation.

Q. Eluding every metaphor or symbol, avoiding the returns that these bring about, is it therefore possible to bring together tautologically, spirit from the material and material of the spirit in that which you create?
R. Yes, I believe that, as an example in shaking someone's hand you can perceive their "strength", even towards things, all things material in general is established a relationship of profound contact, even only in a visual touch. I am fascinated also by the idea of the non-existent "point" where everything gets its origin (The uncreated-author's note). There is no nature in the universe that is not made of non-material and the point is from where originates the whole cosmos.

*(Interview published in: "L'Arca", Milan, Nov. 1989, n32, pp.102-103)