PlinioMesciulium
Biography
Plinio Mesciulam (1926, Genoa, Italy) is an Italian artist whose multifaceted practice spans abstract painting, conceptual art, performance, and artists’ books. Over the course of seven decades, Mesciulam has been a persistent and restless innovator, deeply engaged with the evolution of form, communication, and artistic language. He began his career in the immediate postwar period, participating in the V Quadriennale in Rome in 1948, exhibiting alongside a new generation of Italian abstractionists including Piero Dorazio, Emilio Vedova, and Bruno Munari. His early works explored gestural abstraction, using ink and unconventional techniques to liberate the act of drawing from representation—a direction he formally introduced to Genoa in a landmark solo exhibition in 1950. From 1952 to 1954, Mesciulam was involved with the Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC), promoting the integration of color and form within architectural space. He helped establish a Genoese branch of MAC, working with regional artists to advance the language of concrete and non-figurative art. By the mid-1950s, Mesciulam’s interest shifted toward the tactile and symbolic. His experiments began to incorporate textured materials such as glue and sawdust, and his imagery referenced older pictorial traditions filtered through a raw, anti-academic sensibility. These works bridged lyrical abstraction with what would later align with Art Brut. In the 1960s, he moved toward media critique and visual language, drawing from advertising and exploring the interface between word and image. His inquiries into semiotics and public communication led to the formation of the Cond group in 1965, a collective effort rooted in conceptual research and text-based experimentation. One of his most visionary projects, launched in 1976, was the Mohammed Restricted Communication Center—an international postal network that reimagined communication as a closed-circuit system. With over 1,300 exchanges recorded, the project prefigured aspects of digital and net-based art. Archives related to this work are held at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and MART in Trento. In the following decades, Mesciulam returned to themes of architecture and illusion, developing complex pictorial strategies involving distorted windows, mirrored perspectives, and ornamental density. These later works reveal his sustained interest in perception, paradox, and spatial construction. Today, Mesciulam’s work is held in numerous public and private collections. His lifelong inquiry into visual language, systems, and transformation continues to mark him as a singular and forward-thinking figure in contemporary Italian art.