16 DARSENA VIAREGGINA - EN

16. Darsena viareggina 1950 pencil and oil on plywood, cm 35 x 50

This horizontal view is entirely occupied by the Burlamacca canal, whose waters reflect three small boats moored with their bows facing left. In the background, a parallel wall divides the canal from the tree-lined street with three large pine trees in front of the houses. These, of different heights, have a light background with touches of green to define doors and windows, and are characterized by vertical and horizontal graphic profiles that, together with the pier, create a geometric structure on the surface. The background is a blue sky with indistinct white streaks. The lines that roughly outline the rounded and wavy contours of the trees and the synthetic ones of the boats prepare the shape to accommodate the stains and streaks of color, diluted just enough to make the linear structure of the painting visible.

Insights

Even in his post-war views of Viareggio, Catarsini shows a reflection on his work that constitutes the sign of a profound and coherent renewal, evolving towards a synthesis between sign and color.

It seems that Catarsini has been accommodating the drawing to the color rather than the color to the drawing or that he has enjoyed alternating them, almost playing with their respective roles, in spite of the pictorial tradition and the habits that had belonged to him in the previous decades.

And in the blue of the water of this canal, in which his Viareggio is reflected, he seems to find the same pleasure in painting that “orgy of cadmium yellows mixed with scarlet vermilions” of his youth, which sink into the mirror of the water of the dock, now less lit by his romantic temperament and more marked by the search for a balance between reason (graphic structure) and feeling (emotional value of color).