From a period of almost total inactivity, due in part to a car accident in 1960, Nigro gradually returned to his work.

Alongside his final research into “total space”, between 1961 and 1964, Nigro also introduced a new perceptive mechanism, using the technique of collage, so as to attenuate the grid structure that until that point had been a feature of his work. The new series of “vibratile collages”, which can be seen in the next gallery, got under way.

Dark tones dominated in the reticular tensions and in the works he made from 1956 to the end of the decade, while the collages stand out for their particular delicacy and luminosity and the tenuousness of their colours. To obtain these shapes, which consist of circles in a sunburst pattern, created by a very closely packed sequence of thin, intersecting lines, Nigro used small triangles of paper that he assembled on the canvas – hence the use of the term “collage”. 

These works bring about a twofold association in our minds: on the one hand it seems one is entering a cosmos – a universe of countless stars where all contingency of time is lost and where space has thinned out to the point that stretches to infinity. On the other hand, it seems like one is observing the inside of a crystal, until one manages to see the most infinitesimal particles that form it. This sensation is made all the stronger by the fact that, when describing these collages, the artist himself spoke of “crystallographic” relationships. 

The “vibratile collages” were first shown at the 32nd Venice Biennale in 1964, to which Nigro had been invited by Lucio Fontana.