Stagioni (2019) captures Stefano Contiero’s earliest investigation of natural cycles and emotional resilience, presenting three seasons in perpetual celebration while deliberately excluding winter. The collection’s trio of works captures autumn’s warm corals and cooling blues, spring’s vibrant pinks and gentle grays, and summer’s brilliant yellows dancing with deep blue accents through gestural compositions that feel both spontaneous and considered. Each piece transforms seasonal transitions into moments of visual joy and chromatic abundance, embodying the artist’s selective curation of experience.
The deliberate absence of winter speaks to the work’s deeper psychological framework. Contiero’s omission of the cold season reflects his personal relationship with that challenging period, both physically and metaphorically, transforming artistic selection into a form of emotional curation. Where Arcimboldo rendered seasons through allegorical portraiture, Contiero distills them into pure abstraction, echoing the Impressionists’ sensitivity to shifting light and seasonal atmosphere though translated here into a digital and abstract vocabulary that establishes its own contemporary logic of survival and selective preservation.
These seasonal compositions embrace pure abstraction through scattered, expressive marks that accumulate into dense, energetic surfaces. Dynamic brushstrokes and color fragments dance across each composition, creating rhythmic patterns that evoke seasonal moods through chromatic relationships rather than representational imagery. This early investigation of how digital processes might capture organic rhythms prefigures the flowing abstractions of Saturazione (2021) and establishes cyclical time as a recurring theme throughout Contiero’s practice.
Through its celebration of three seasons while deliberately omitting winter, Stagioni establishes a fundamental approach to artistic practice as selective curation of experience. This early wisdom about choosing what to preserve and what to release would become central to Contiero’s methodology, influencing everything from the careful editing evident in his later curated collections to his philosophical approach to memory and time.