It all started way back in 1949. It was a year of great pain for the little Enzo Mignecowho had lost his mother prematurely. But it was also the year of the great discovery, the one that would allow him to one day become the painter TogoThe place is Lipari, the Aeolian Islands, which have always remained in his heart and in his colors.
For a year, the boy Enzo, 12 years old, goes to live with his aunt Rina, a natural sciences teacher, and attends the second year of middle school in Lipari. As I have already written in the past, he admires the colors of nature, is in constant contact with the sea, but above all he comes across a “new thing” that will change his life and that materializes through a painter (whose name we do not know), at that time forced into confinement. He is of a certain age, he is not Italian, but he has a great passion: painting. And he is there, on the seashore, painting “en plein air”, exposing his technique to those who are near him enchanted. From there Togo is born who little by little overlaps with Enzo Migneco, pouring into the pseudonym (from the English to go, to go) the pictorial family blood, coming from his uncle Giuseppe.
75 years have passed since then, and the painter (born by chance in Milan, where his father was working, but Messina to the core, despite his professional return to the Lombard capital) adds to his many awards that of an anthological exhibition, open until September 24th in the prestigious headquarters of the Lombardy Region, embellished by a catalogue with contributions from the poet Guido Oldani and the art historian Carlo Vanoni.
These are works (particularly interesting is also the section dedicated to engravings, in which Togo excels) that go from 1964 to today and confirm how the artist has been able to move forward with the evolution of a completely personal style, marked by an increasingly lively and powerful use of color, and for this reason recognizable and inimitable. He has traveled all these years accepting a continuous comparison with all the movements and all the fashions, but remaining true to himself, appearing at times outdated and at other times avant-garde. There are those who say that he preceded the return to the most original concept of painting desired by the Transavanguardia, a consideration that highlights an aspect that is all the more true for an artist who like him, albeit always in his own way, had started from the realism of Migneco and Guttuso and then immediately distanced himself from it, without ever forgetting the primacy of painting in the strict sense, typical of his vision of art. Today, in 2024, his paintings still propose the Mediterranean “landscapes” with an abstraction that continually borders on figuration, without ever entering it. They do so by constantly renewing themselves, because the dialogue between the colors – bright, solar, full Aeolian – remains full of nuances and does not propose borders but unions and dialogues.
By painting the primacy of nature in canvases in which the human presence is substantially absent even if perceptible, Togo expresses a political-social belief, linked to the needs of peaceful coexistence, to the community of intent, to solidarity. Those who know him know well how much the artist from Messina believes in these things, but his painting would be trivialized if it were part of a political commitment. Nature and painting are inextricably linked within him, they form a disruptive statement, which he cannot help but express.
That boy who met painting in Lipari in 1949 remained in the foreground inside him, he passed through the beloved Matisse, Gauguin, the idol Picasso and the German expressionists, to return and remain in the colors of the Aeolian Islands, assumed as colors of the world, of creation, of the only possible life. Everything is also testified by the beautiful video present in the exhibition, made by Marco Dentici, an excellence of Italian cinema.
Togo’s constant returns to his beloved Briga Marina are the reservoir of inspiration, then brought and brought back to Milan, in his cave-studio near Porta Romana, a unique place, where it seems that one can get lost in a chaotic and labyrinthine darkness and where instead his works give light and energy. As also happens in this important exhibition in the Lombardy Region, in a path of works that shines with its own light.
