The exhibition presents twenty large-scale works belonging to the Guardare in alto [Looking up] cycle, on which the artist worked throughout the 1980s until his death in 1991.

Throughout Berti's work, the artist invents a graphic and plastic motif and then proceeds to replicate it in countless variants that always bring something new, a development, a possible enrichment to the basic idea. Indeed, the motifs that recur in his production are few in number, but each of them functions as a nucleus capable of continually generating new formal solutions. Guardare in alto [Looking up] is his latest idea, a series that is almost a long spiritual testament, to which the artist wanted to entrust the ultimate message addressed to his contemporaries and perhaps even to posterity. An absolutely positive, humanitarian and progressive message. 

In these paintings, which follow the Grandi costruzioni per l'avvenire [Great Constructions for the Future], structural characteristic is the dizzying upward tension, almost a vortex that supports the vertical momentum of imposing constructions. For Berti, the dimension of building has always been fundamental, unavoidable: it is the very desire of society, of man to change and improve the world and the environment. 

In these works, the background breaks up, tending to white, to pure, intrusive light. The sign texture tends to widen in the accentuation of a certain formal unpleasantness, which works to the advantage of the architectural and plastic components, increasingly central and characterizing. The colour is almost a fracture of the sign and accentuates the infinite vertigo that is projected elsewhere, outside the painting. There are many nuances that the artist knows how to imprint on this ascending tension, always expressed by an adverb that accompanies the recurring title throughout the series, “clearly”, “firmly”, “limpidly”, “solidly”...

Berti's sign builds and destroys, it is dialectical, antagonistic, never reductively individualistic. Paintings about conflict, the only means to break the mediocre and inertial continuity of the existing, of politics and society. Manifesto works that cry out the artist's personal attitude towards the reality of the Florentine environment, towards which his soul had never been appeased by resigning itself to the state of things. The painting is articulated in an unlimited succession of inevitable variants on the single theme that we can define as “positive thinking”: a pictorially rich and dense positive thinking that the artist confidently consigns to the world of the future.