Giuseppe Zigaina tells his own story — through his paintings, drawings, and engravings; in his theoretical statements, autobiographical writings, and interviews. He speaks about himself and his art, rereading and interpreting his artistic journey while choosing, each time, different interlocutors.

This book aims to reconstruct two “stories” set in periods of particular significance for Zigaina.

The first recounts an exhibition, “Zigaina: Graphic Works 1947–1972,” inaugurated in Gradisca in 1973 in the spaces of what is now the Spazzapan Gallery, and the painter’s dialogue with Giuseppe Marchiori: an exhibition centered on drawing, which became an opportunity to trace a coherent line of development between his realist works and the more recent, densely symbolic investigations from Dal colle di Redipuglia.

The second focuses on Zigaina’s donation to the CSAC (Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione) of the University of Parma, the university archive/museum founded in 1968 by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle: more than one hundred works (paintings, drawings, engravings) documenting Zigaina’s research from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. Above all, however, they make it possible to reconstruct a process of elaboration — a working methodology.

In the sequence of images, it is in fact possible to follow step by step, starting from the earliest sketches, that ongoing transformation and contamination of figurative nuclei that at times unfolds over decades, linking stage designs and canvases, sketches and etchings.