Unequivocal Ambiguities establishes a connection between the artistic explorations of Alberto Colliva (1943–2023) and Vittorio Mascalchi (1935–2010) during the 1970s, highlighting elective affinities that only an appropriate historical distance allows us to discern. Upon closer examination, a link between the two artists could already be traced back to their beginnings within the informal art movement, as was almost inevitable in Bologna in the late 1950s. This was a purely contextual proximity, born of their shared city, which became more exclusive and compelling around 1960 when both artists specialized in incorporating object-like elements into their canvases, inspired by the New Dada movement. While Colliva’s restrained and minimalist use of mixed media incorporated metallic caps, rods, wrappings, adhesive notes, and fragments of varying thickness, Mascalchi embraced a denser composition of signals, symbols, and logos. However, both shared a need to engage directly with visible reality and the most artificial aspects of everyday life, arranged according to more or less balanced patterns that left little room for chance. Even their respective experiences in the late 1960s show a general alignment in values, as both revealed a clear interest in constructions and structures: more allusive in Colliva's case, more abstract in Mascalchi's. Colliva’s canvases after 1965 depicted undefined scaffolding or incomplete architectures set against homogeneous and unblemished backdrops, collapsing into an asphyxiating void. These images relied on the perceptual tension created by the interplay between the three-dimensionality of volumes and the two-dimensionality of their supporting planes. Mascalchi’s works after 1965, on the other hand, stemmed from an investigation of the mechanisms of visual perception, focusing on the refractive effects of Plexiglas. Though material in execution, these solutions also explored the contrast between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, achieved through overlapping transparent sheets of various shapes and thicknesses. This phase marked the emergence of some fundamental elements in their 1970s research, which this exhibition aims to highlight. These solutions reflect a particular artistic climate: a rethinking of painting as a series of processes to be internally investigated through an analytical and tautological approach akin to contemporary conceptual art practices. This involved reducing the artwork to a physical or mental process using traditional tools and emphasizing their structural properties. Such principles underlie what has alternately been termed New Painting, Painting-Painting, or Analytical Painting, aiming to examine the most basic tools and procedures of the painterly language. Through entirely independent paths, Colliva and Mascalchi, during those same years, engaged in a reflection on the nature of the pictorial image starting from its constituent units, operating at the boundary between the illusory strategies of spatial representation and the revelatory processes of the materials used. Both artists produced images based on the interplay between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality. However, they combined a reexamination of the logic of perspective vision with an investigation into chromatic ranges that served to highlight the materiality of the support. Colliva’s gradual solidification of architectural volumes, already outlined in the mid-1960s, led him toward an enigmatic hyperrealism that explored the consistency of surfaces. This resulted in unsettling close-up visions of doors, doorframes, hatches, and ruined walls sealed at every opening. These elements belong to an imaginary environment, projected out of time and suspended in an indecipherable light of metaphysical lineage. This restless, uneven, atmosphere-deprived world draws the observer into a labyrinth of crisp and imperfect geometries, devoid of any structural completion. The ambiguity of these spaces—so vivid, detailed, yet inaccessible—leads the viewer to question their own cognitive abilities, drawing their gaze to vertiginous heights where nothing seems recognizable anymore. Colliva thus undertakes an internal verification of painting processes but relies on objective, measurable parameters, focusing on the logic of representation to dismantle and reassemble it from within. His inquiry is not confined to the material factors of the artwork alone; as Pier Giovanni Castagnoli wrote in 1973, this represents "an attempt to recenter vision and refocus it to verify with what eyes we see and what space, and what world lies before us." Mascalchi’s approach to Painting-Painting in the early 1970s, on the other hand, appears to find indirect connections to early experiments in computer graphics, owing to the immaterial, vibrant volumes he profiled on canvas. Here, too, the virtual space designed by the artist became a visual field in which to test and deconstruct the mechanisms of illusion, using an irregular system of oblique axes that concentrate and expand within an undefined void. This internal mobility of structures distinguishes Mascalchi’s work from strictly defined Analytical Painting: his research delves into color-light interactions and refraction effects within the virtuality of a constructive space brimming with perceptual challenges. The canvas functions as a projective field where diagonals intersect in essential but dynamic rhythms, drawn into the focal points of irregular, multiple perspectives. For this reason, in 1974, Castagnoli identified in Mascalchi's painting a "symptomatology of uncertainty," "restlessness," and "instability." Upon closer examination, what initially appear to be rigorously calibrated geometries reveal themselves as full of thrusts, diversions, polycentric tensions, and directional upheavals that compel the viewer’s gaze into repeated spatial incongruities. Colliva and Mascalchi thus present two distinct yet not incompatible interpretations of the analytical trend of the 1970s. They offer two different approaches to conducting an internal verification of painting processes, played out in the contrast between the precise delineation of formal structures and the undefined expansion of their depth.