In these works, one feels there is a need to go beyond the theory of pure vision and to make way for more expressly existential themes. As the artist himself was to say in an interview in 1969, his was: “an aesthetic research as an intimate structure of man”. 

The works in this series are distinguished by the presence of a single, repeated subject: bands consisting of a set of orthogonal straight lines. These form grids that then occupy the entire surface of the painting, endlessly interweaving and crossing each other. The result is a complex construction in which the colour is parcelled out by the black lines, which crowd the surface, dividing it like small pieces. This series of works contends with the two-dimensional spatial quality of painting and has the potential for going beyond the traditional perspective view. 

Nigro’s knowledge of music helps give the right interpretation of “total space”: “... Through the example of musical construction and its quadrature, I investigated the essential nature of the pictorial elements in their repetitions, variations, coincidences, and simultaneous possibilities. I thus managed to arrive at the formulation, or rather, I simply noticed the existence, of a ‘total space’, which one can sense in the painting only through abstract elements studied in their variations and simultaneity, and consequently through the conceptions of scientific relativism.”

The “total space” cycle will be carried on by Nigro until the mid-sixties.
In 1956, the Soviet Union began military manoeuvres in the lead up to the invasion of Hungary, an event that profoundly brought the artist’s social and political conscience into question and affected the development of his work. The logic that had underpinned the formal construction of “total space” began to falter and the grid that had held these works together was broken by the dramatic nature of the events, creating an oppressive latticework with a sombre radiance. Beneath it we can make out the appearance of a swirling colour that seems to be about to gain the upper hand, as in Tensioni drammatiche, 1956, and in the two Senza titolo of 1956.