After a solo exhibition in 1923, Antonio Calderara gave up his studies in engineering in 1925, which he had begun two years earlier at the Milan polytechnic, for the sake of painting. As an autodidact, Calderara is a painter, who experimented a lot between the 1930s and the late 1950s, attempting many different styles in a short period of time. His ouevre included still lives related to Morandi's quiet meditative style, Impressionist style landscapes, figurative pictures and portraits in 'Neue Sachlichkeit' style. Searching for his final and appropriate artistic expression, the misty landscape of Lake Orta, where he lived for several decades and which fascinated Calderara, became his favorite subject. Gradually, in reaching a higher degree of abstraction in his Lake Orta landscapes, Claderara finally abandoned landscapes and architecture and discovered a completely abstract world in which reality is apparent only as a memory. In 1959 the artist painted his first purely abstract painting according to his own emotions. From this period he developed an abstract style in pastel colors which is close to that of Albers. Based on the principle of the Golden Section, numbers and proportions were of great importance to Calderara. The artist coined the term 'spazio mentale', 'mental space' to describe his geometric approach. Calderara differs from the representatives of Constructivism and Art Concrète in that he does not follow strictly radical image concepts or color schemes despite all his systematics, but his approach was more intuitive. Calderara himself described his artistic intention as follows: "I want to paint nothingness, which is the whole, silence, light, measure, order, harmony. The infinite." Until his death Antonio Claderara lived in Milan and Vaciago.