Ernesto Treccani (Milan, 1920 – Milan, 2009) was an Italian painter, one of the most important figures of the Italian 20th century, founder of the Corrente group. Witness to a profound evolutionary path, Ernesto Treccani’s painting was radically transformed over the years. After the realist beginnings that characterised his research until the late 1950s, the artist gradually moved away from objective representation and embraced an increasingly lyrical and allusive language from the 1960s onwards. Over the years, his painting expands towards a poetic and introspective dimension, the form dematerialises, the sharp realist subject with clear contours vanishes, the sign becomes increasingly rarefied and vibrant, the touch increasingly fleeting and lyrical. From the 1980s onwards, the sign becomes light, the colour is freed from the contours and the pictorial material is transformed into a vibrant metamorphic and synaesthetic dance of shapes and colours. In the 1990s, Treccani reaches the apex of this research, where evanescent and poetic atmospheres intertwine with explosions of colour and matter.