Unità (2020) confronts the fundamental challenge of maintaining coherence while navigating conflicting internal forces. Created in March 2020, this intimate collection of just two works explores what the artist describes as “a separation between two ideologies” that “struggles to keep unity.” The visual manifestation is striking in its simplicity: horizontal fields where contrasting colors meet and blend at their boundaries, creating zones of tension and resolution that speak to the difficulty of reconciling opposing aspects of identity.
The two works present complementary investigations into duality. In both pieces, distinct color fields occupy opposite sides of the composition, their meeting point becoming a site of visual negotiation where boundaries blur and merge. The first work employs deep blues transitioning through white to warm reds, while the second explores the relationship between green and blue tonalities. This restrained palette and horizontal orientation evoke landscape traditions, yet the works function more as psychological territories than geographical spaces.
The algorithmic process generates soft transitions that resist sharp division, allowing opposing forces to meet and merge rather than clash. The flowing linear textures that build these horizontal color fields echo the gestural investigations of Cy Twombly, whose repetitive mark-making similarly explored the boundary between order and chaos, and Julie Mehretu’s layered linear compositions that create complex atmospheric spaces through accumulated marks. These works also connect to broader traditions of textile and drawing practices where parallel lines create both texture and meaning, transforming simple linear elements into complex emotional territories through patient accumulation and subtle variation.
The collection emerged during a period of global uncertainty and personal reflection, when questions of identity, belonging, and ideological coherence felt particularly urgent. The works suggest that true unity may not require the elimination of difference but rather the capacity to hold contradictions in productive tension, a philosophy embodied biologically in Organismo (2020), where dual impulses of creation and destruction manifest as explosive radial forms emerging from oceanic depths.
“Unità II” was exhibited at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai and later presented and sold at Poly Auction’s “Generative Art and the Future” exhibition in Shenzhen in 2021. The collection’s exploration of identity and belonging established themes that would resonate throughout Contiero’s subsequent practice, demonstrating that the most profound artistic statements often emerge from the patient contemplation of life’s essential contradictions.