The structure of this art work is similar to that of Dallo spazio totale, 1954-1956, Totem, 1965, a work that was destroyed in the Mafia attack against the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC) in Milan on 27 July 1993. The institution had been preparing an anthological exhibition of works by the artist, who had died a year previously. The “trellises” in the gallery, Dal tempo totale: traliccio a rombi progressivi and Dal tempo totale: traliccio a rombi progressivi simultanei, both of 1967 and shown at the 34th Venice Biennale in 1968, feature a series of small wooden rods painted in different colours, such as white, red, and black and white, crossing each other to form rhomboidal figures. 

As their titles indicate, we find in these works the concept of “total time”, the theoretical assumptions of which the artist had explained in his essay Oltre lo ‘spazio totale’: per un ‘tempo totale’, which he wrote in 1966. Here Nigro analyses the evolutionary process of his visual language, highlighting the importance that the concept of ‘time’ had now acquired for him: “Since there is no longer any relationship between the texture and other points on the surface of the support – and not even with its own borders – the dimension of space is eliminated, while the dimension of time acquires absolute value.” 

The conception of “total time”, as Carla Lonzi wrote in 1968, “tends to remove the individual from the continuation of the tragedy, somehow revealing its nature. Space is eliminated in the works of ‘total time’: perspective visions demarcated within ideal rhombuses and themselves formed of many rhombuses, all different and all in an exact geometrical relationship with each other, convey the psychic experience of time (regardless of the spatial episode in which this takes place) visually appearing as a transition between a beginning and an end.”