Afro Basaldella studied art and later taught mosaic in Venice. His paintings emanate an underlying luminosity, most likely inspired by Venice's radiant atmosphere and its pictorial tradition. By emphasizing transparency and overlapping, and complementary light-soaked and darker hues with trembling contours, the forms in the painting assume a lyrical, even poetic, character. They linger on the border between traces of figuration and complete abstraction. Afro deployed post-Cubist aesthetics, indebted to collage compositions. A frequent traveler to the United States from 1950, he also assimilated the gestural character of American Abstract Expressionism. This manifests itself in his forceful and expressive application of paint.