Even in the variety of its solutions, Alberto Colliva's artistic research is all marked by the alternation between cohesion and disintegration of the image, carried out according to choices and modes that are always opposite to those of the dominant trends. It is a reflection on the status of the image carried out within the image itself, conceived as the threshold of a utopia of the visible. Colliva's path officially began in June 1962 when, together with Maurizio Bottarelli and Franco Filippi, he opened the Battibecco atelier in Bologna, a self-managed space thanks to which the three young painters imposed themselves on the city's attention with innovative proposals aimed at overcoming Informalism. To the concentrated and dense materialism of Informal painting Colliva opposes, starting as early as 1960, a minimal, resigned polymaterism, scanned in weights and controlled in dosages: in fact, the artist rethinks the support, canvas or paper, as an anti-gravitational space within which to orchestrate, without pre-established schemes, material happenings and object fragments. Radicalized in contrasts, these