«What, until then, was the rigidity, implacability almost of the new “reality” (totally already independent by the naturalist reference and the subsequent process of abstraction made against it) that concrete painting claimed for itself – what had been axiom and certainty, now it hurts, and it is hopeless: like the remains of an eroded geometry that nowadays rarely appear, ‘figures’ now uncertain and frank, besieged by the clear background that everywhere axes them, in the riotous space of the painting. They slaughter and shake, those bodies smelled and violated by a sharpening way of the pictorial painting: they lose the integrity of the previous plastic purity, the impenetrability of the bodies to the air around them; and it is in this first unknown fog that is drawn, then takes on a definitive form, the way that little by little will be called the “sign” of Sanfilippo ( Fabrizio D’Amico )».

Precisely of that “sign” to which Sanfilippo, among the founders of the Forma 1 group in 1947 with P. Dorazio, A. Perilli, P. Consagra and G. Turcato, arrives in the biennium of ’53 – ’54, leaving behind the concretism of the cubist and constructivist matrix, the work on display in "Percorsi nell'informale Italiano", exhibition guested by Ottocento Art Gallery, constitutes a superlative test: emerges the concept of space elaborated by the Sicilian painter, “a space to be filled, to be populate, to be infused, with an horror vacui that is firstly love for the original form”.

The work, run by small areas of colors, a forest of chromatic symbols, comes from the reflections elaborated by Sanfilippo after the second trip to Paris, carried out in January of ’51 with Carla Accardi ( whom he had married in September of ’49), during which he not only rediscovers the poetry of Arp and Kandinsky, but he meets directly Hans Hartung, whose influence will be decisive for his painting, and Alberto Magnelli, who has already been well known to him, at least since ’48.

That of the early Fifties is a particularly happy season for the Sicilian painter: he holds personal solo – exhibitions in galleries strongly oriented to new languages, such as the Chiarazzi showcase in Rome, the Salto Bookstore in Milan, the Age d’Or in Rome, the Cavallino in Venice, the Schneider again in Rome, the Naviglio in Milan.