Licini was born in 1894 in Monte Vidon Corrado, in the Marche region, and his artistic and cultural education took place in Italy and France. His presence in Paris at the end of the Twenties was at the root of his decision to abandon his “realist” approach - centred on landscape painting with a distinct Cezanne influence - to focus on abstract painting. As a result of his contact with the Abstraction-Création group, in around 1931 he produced his first abstract works, in which both a deep knowledge of the work of Kandinsky and Klee and an innate sense of line can be detected. The artist became part of the circle of the Milan gallery Il Milione and, in an open letter written on the occasion of his solo exhibition of 1935 and published in the gallery's Bulletin no. 35, he clarifies the lyrical and imaginative approach to his work: “We will show that geometry can become feeling”. Maria Cernuschi Ghiringhelli, considered by Carlo Belli to be Licini’s muse and discoverer, immediately fell in love with his art, and it was the Licini works she bought in 1942 that set in motion her painting “collection”. 1933’s “Ritmo” presents the characteristics of the abstract Licini, conscious of geometry but with an intensity of colour capable of disrupting the compositional structure, expressing itself in pictorially vibrant surfaces.  
(Michela Murialdo)