During this period, the choice of colours is less pleasant, black is used more and more, the elements on the pictorial surface are reduced, the structure is more essential. In some works, Mustica concentrates on monochrome bands in the centre of the composition, obtained by removing colour. He retrospectively named this series of works Giornate di pittura (Days of Painting) and from that moment on the title of the works coincided with the date on which they were painted.

In 1994 he exhibited Más allá del color at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, with texts by Giorgio Cortenova and Claudio Cerritelli. In these works the colour is less pleasant and playful[i] and the fluid movement of the sign is abandoned: it is the moment in which Mustica goes further and makes the painting a space for questioning form, matter and emptiness[ii]. He works with the I.A.W. Internationale Architektur Werkstatt studio and in particular with Gioacchino Alvente and Alberto Priolo on the graphic presentation of the architectural drawings, created by the architects for the international competition for the new headquarters of the Dresdner Bank in Dresden. The project marks the beginning of a collaboration that will continue over time.

In the same year, Nino Mustica began visiting some architecture studios in Milan, in particular the studio of Mario Bellini and the architect Francesco Bellini, who were experimenting with the technology of Silicon Graphics, a US computer company that developed specialised graphic terminals used to accelerate the visualisation of three-dimensional images. These were two years of fundamental evolution and great change: the introduction of computer technology in professional and domestic environments modified the artist’s working methods and marked the transition from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional dimension. It was a crucial moment because Mustica created the project for the Evoluzioni pittoriche (Pictorial Evolutions) and the Forme pittoriche (Pictorial Forms) that would accompany him throughout his subsequent production: the re-elaboration of painting in digital form using software and the subsequent three-dimensional realisation.

In the nineties, with the new industrial revolution brought about by the computer with the Alias programme from Silicon, I strongly felt these changes. As soon as I managed to extrapolate the virtual from the computer screen I felt a strong sense of nausea. When I saw that virtuality could become real, it was as if thoughts could become solid. This solid thought shocked me emotionally.


[i] Claudio Cerritelli, Nino Mustica. Oltre l’effetto del colore, in Teresa Tronconi (ed.), Mustica. Más allá del color, Galleria d’Arte Niccoli, Parma, 1994, p. 17
[ii] Ibidem

The series of Evoluzioni pittoriche tridimensionali (three-dimensional pictorial evolutions) originated from his first experiments with this software. These were digital graphics that were initially only virtual, but from 2002 onwards were printed with vegetable colours on a plotter on watercolour paper. From these he subsequently developed the Forme pittoriche tridimensionali (three-dimensional pictorial forms), fibreglass sculptures that he has been producing since 1996. A painting is digitised, processed on the computer to create a three-dimensional rendering, and then translated into fibreglass. He creates his first works, divided into sections, with the support of Angelo Musumeci, a friend who produces advertising signs. In the titles of all the works there is a reference to the original painting and, in most cases, especially in the first part of the research, he chooses to present them as triptychs: painting plus canvas plus plotter plus three-dimensional pictorial form (in most cases made of fibreglass treated with polyurethane paints) and a video cassette documenting the pictorial metamorphosis.

The starting point for his search for the image is broad brushstrokes of colour that are applied to the canvas and that the painter traces from top to bottom, from left to right, or diagonally, and that he crosses or mixes together. An expression reduced to its fundamental components, without object, gestural. This painting constitutes the matrix of the subsequent work, which however no longer takes place on the canvas but on the computer. The scanned painting as an electronic image is then transformed in such a way as to free itself from its two-dimensional physical state to become a three-dimensional pictorial form. The transformation process takes place through the medium of video, therefore indirectly; and yet it is real, since the electronically composed image in pixels exists as electrical matter. For Nino Mustica, however, this is only one aspect of his research. For him it is important to make this electronic transposition also perceptible in free space, in the air. For this reason the three-dimensional computerised simulations are transferred into ‘real’ three-dimensional pictorial forms, made of fibreglass. These, in their now three-dimensional form, are not painted with the colouring developed by the computer, but in monochrome, varnished with a ‘skin’ of glossy colour. This procedure can be explained as follows: the three levels are anchored in space to visualise the different stages of development of the transformation of the pictorial surface in space. The first level is the two-dimensional image, composed with acrylic and oil, of the painting hanging on the wall. The second level shows the virtual, coloured and computerised expression of the three-dimensional object, created with the aid of the computer.Finally, the third level is the monochrome three-dimensional pictorial form, which is arranged in space so that the colours of the painting on canvas are reflected in it. When this form is given a slight movement, a further perceptual level is produced, because the colour, which is reflected in it on its three-dimensional skin, changes.[i]

My research highlights the very close relationship that has always existed between painting and sculpture. Except that I project it into the computer age. However, the fact that these forms are three-dimensional does not imply that they are sculptures. They were not conceived as such, but as pictorial facts that are completely transformed by changing the point of view.


My intention has always been to reflect on the possible formal variations that technology can allow for the emotion expressed in the magic of pictorial action: this results in the construction of plastic/pictorial dimensions produced with the help of technology but conceived by painting in a continuous play between different spatial and temporal dimensions. Since 1994 my interest has been focused on the search for possible new variations of pictorial space intended as the Spirit of Time.


This is a crucial period, in which he defines the process for the re-elaboration of digital painting, using software, and the subsequent three-dimensional realisation. Mustica chooses to appropriate the possibilities of digital modelling, approaching the investigation conducted in the field of architecture, the plastic modelling of Frank O. Gehry and anticipating the complexity of the work of Peter Eisenmann, Greg Lynn, Massimiliano Fuksas and Zaha Hadid.

The Three-dimensional Pictorial Forms are a historical documentation of constructive innovation, acquired at the turn of the millennium, applied to art, and as such they assume a significant value that future generations will be able to appreciate, better than we contemporaries. Compared to the experience pursued in a similar period by Frank Gehry in the architectural sector, with constructions that form a link between architecture and art, the Three-dimensional Pictorial Forms declare the entrance of society into the third millennium. Both Mustica and Gehry have been able to seize them, each from their respective points of view, through multidisciplinary reciprocity. While others experimented with a conceptual approach, declaring future possibilities offered by contemporary technology, both created tangible works and built solid models with which others would later be confronted, perhaps without citing their authorship.[ii]

[i] Helmut Herbst, Skin to Skin in Mustica. Skin to Skin, Museum der Stadt, Waiblingen, 2002, s.p.
[ii] Fortunato D’Amico, op. cit., p. 63

In 1995 he created the cover for the book The Eternal Return and Other Stories by Vasilija Grossmann, published by Heft edizioni, and presented the work at Muzejski Prostor, Zagreb, where he presented an overview of his work from 1981 to 1995. In the works exhibited at Studio Carlo Grossetti, Demetrio Paparoni, author of the text in the catalogue, identifies as a common element the fact that they are characterised by motifs that do not arise from an overlap with the background, but from the concealment of their own contours, and speaks of abstraction redefined, quoting David Reed and Steve De Benedetto.

At the theatre in Sabbioneta (Mantua) he presents the large installation Cento metri di Visi (One hundred metres of faces), which involves the interaction between space and audience and consists of a row of two hundred portraits painted on a single canvas one hundred metres long. Mustica has cultivated the portrait genre throughout his career, in which the figurative attention of his origins is summarised in a simplified and essential trait.

Also in some of the works from 1995 and 1996 (Wednesday 10 May 1995, 1995; Thursday 11 May 1995, 1995; Wednesday 14 February 1996, 1996; Friday 12 April 1996, 1996; Friday 28 June 1996, 1996; Friday 26 July 1996, 1996) the sign seems to have been drawn in a single gesture with a large black brushstroke on a monochrome surface, with a regular and confident line. In these works, for example by Agnes Kohlmeyer[i] and Jacqueline Ceresoli[ii], we can see an affinity with Japanese gestural painting, a memory of the research conducted on Chinese and Japanese ideograms during the years of study in Rome.

I copied ideograms and calligrams by tracing violent black marks on newspaper. I was fascinated by the overlapping of writing. In oriental culture a sign expresses an entire concept and tells a story that goes far beyond the explicit meaning of what it appears to be. These scripts activate continuous references to something else.

[i] Agnes Kohlmeyer, Nino Mustica – Al di là della pittura, in Nino Mustica, Galerie Schloss Mochental, 1997, p. 44
[ii] Jacqueline Ceresoli, Tecno Pittura – Hyper Space Attitude: Forme Pittoriche Tridimensionali di Nino Mustica in Richard Burns, Jacqueline Ceresoli, Helmut Herbst (ed.), Mustica, Bury ArtGallery, Manchester, 2006, p. 3119

In 1996 he was in Mexico, where he presented Pictorial Evolutions and Pictorial Forms in Dialogue at an exhibition at the José Luis Cuevas Museum, with texts by Claudio Cerritelli, Jorge Juanes and Enrico Granara.

In the same year he also began experimenting with video: in Pictorial Evolutions (1996-1997) he describes the process of creating the works. In the video, a rectangular figure detaches itself from the wall, begins to pulsate and then assumes the form suggested by the lines and trajectories traced on its surface. The figure first rotates on itself, then the two-dimensional image becomes three-dimensional, assuming different configurations in space.

The universe of geometric bodies loses its iconographic characteristics of linearity and overcomes the conformism of the right angle and the balance of parts. Instead, it finds other ways of combining visual weight, broken lines and the static nature of the object. In this way, the perspective of observation is extended to several points of view. In these it is practically impossible to test symmetrical connections.[i]

Mustica prefers to maintain the role of the painter, without losing sight of the characteristics of the physical seduction of his expressive language. He does not believe that he can renew painting with instruments that are alien to his identity. He is not blinded by the myth of the most advanced technology. He uses them with a sense of joy and play, with a freedom that is free of constraints. He uses them to think differently about the space that colour occupies in our reality, to understand the changes that the eye encounters on its journey, and to change course whenever necessary.

In order to do this, it is necessary to pursue these conditions: the irreplaceable quality of the pigment applied with a brush, the changing effect of the colour: treated with complex computer programmes, the irreplaceable fascination of the chromatic energy as a tangible quality of seeing.[ii]

Colour is emotion, surface and also volume; colour in its metamorphosis, transformed into physical size, means expanding the possibility of showing its infinite energy on another page. My work deals intensively with colour, but also with painting, sculpture and architecture.

[i] Elena Mor, Mustica 2015-1994 in Nino Mustica. The future is now, Scaramouche, New York, 2016, p. 215
[ii] Claudio Cerritelli, A new reality, in GioBatta Meneguzzo (ed.), Mustica, Hefti Edizioni, Milan, 1997, p. 8

In 1997, the artist created a project for the floors of the Carlyle Brera Hotel in Milan. He exhibited the three-dimensional pictorial forms in comparison with the pictorial evolutions of reference at the Casabianca Museum in Malo (Vicenza), curated by Gio Batta Meneguzzo with texts by Claudio Cerritelli and Marco Meneguzzo. Subsequently, the three-dimensional pictorial forms left the space of the studio, the gallery, the museum and were presented in the open air, integrated into the landscape. Between the island of Linosa and the beach at Catania, Nino Mustica explores the concept of metamorphosis, situating a series of white fibreglass forms on the beach, on the rocky volcanic coast, in the middle of the sea, anchored to blocks of stone, where they are almost perceived as buoys by passing boats.

In 1998 he acquired the Alias programme from Silicon Graphics, an investment that gave him even more opportunities to experiment.

In 1999 he installed a sculpture in front of the Museo Civico in Gibellina Nuova, a three-dimensional pictorial development raised from the ground by a metal pillar, and exhibited his studies in Budapest at the WAM Gallery.