The most complete and advanced publication to date on the artist’s practice One of the most emblematic and mysterious protagonists of the return to painting during the 1980s, Alberto Abate (Roma, 1946-2012) belonged to those brave artists who went against the tide, inspired by historians like Maurizio Calvesi and Italo Mussa, fleeing from the avant-garde experiences of the period that were considered guilty of being closed off to their own repetitiveness. In his figurations, which soon followed an independent path with respect to the other “Anachronists” – as Edward Lucie-Smith, among others, pointed out – two vocations emerge and intertwine: on the one hand the learned painter and, on the other, a theorist of aesthetics. Edited by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, arranged chronologically and divided according to the different types of cycles found in the very vast practice of the artist, the Catalogue raisonné of Alberto Abate constitutes a new privileged perspective and overview of his entire career, from which emerges not only the extraordinary wealth of works that made him famous around the world but also the great variety of different themes that constantly characterise his activity. Thus the publication analyses the mythological themes that distinguish his works from the 1980s to symbolic and skillful narrations that offer multiple levels of interpretation in the 1990s, up to a dialogue between figures and geometric forms of a consolidated Cubist-Futurist and Neoconstructivist tradition.