Red is Adam’s colour. Adam means made of red earth. This is a colour always recurrent in the thesaurus of the antique era, a colour that marks both life and murder.

As a Trieste high school graduate, I spent many afternoons in the American Cultural Institute there. At that time, this was the only place where books on art could be found. Under the guidance of the painter and Bauhaus student August Černigoj, who introduced me to the world of plastic arts, we had a lively discussion about the role of red in the work of Mario Sironi, the greatest painter of Italian modernism. His red strikes the ochre, umber or Neapolitan yellow, like a lightning, thus enhancing the power of his artistic expression. In contrast to Everything of Sironi’s world, we have repeatedly noticed Nothing in the red of Barnett Newman, that Christian-Jewish agnostic, who drew red traces on his transcending colour fields.