18 NUDO ROSSO NELL'ATELIER - EN
18. Nudo rosso nell’ Atelier 1948, oil on canvas, 73 x 52 cm
The climate of artistic renewal of the second half of the 1940s pushed Catarsini to explore latent directions of research again. A clear example is this vertical painting depicting a nude model sitting three-quarters to the right on a green armchair, still present today in the painter’s atelier in the attic of Villa Museo Paolina Bonaparte in Viareggio. The model, the central figure of the work, is depicted full-length, with her left arm resting on the armrest and her right arm forward, her hand resting on her belly as if to hide her nudity. The expression on her face is neutral, devoid of obvious emotions.
Insights
The deformations in the model’s body clearly refer to an expressionist syntax, as in the chromaticisms played on the contrast between the two complementary colors, the green of the armchair and the red-orange of the skin. Even the light yellow background of the wall, painted with brushstrokes as rapid as they are contemptuous, declares the search for a synthetic writing comparable to the pictorial line that from the Fauves arrives at the École de Paris.
His participation in the XXIV Venice Biennale in 1948 must have contributed greatly to these and other results, where he sent a figurative painting, Paese, precisely in the year that saw the peak of quality and maturity of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and the presence at the event of many international artists of the first rank. There is no documented link or contact of his, not even indirect, with the experience of the Fronte, but the suggestions that came from that climate certainly pushed him to seek new expressive solutions. Heir to the “irregularities” of Viani, Catarsini had no difficulty in measuring himself against the “linguistic desecrations of an avant-garde without peace (…) that has come to fuse in a restless synthesis naturalism and formalism”, as Franco Solmi maintains.
The artist never joined any trend group, preferring instead to approach different figurative experiences as a result of a profound need for renewal, choosing from time to time what his state of mind and formal urgency suggested to him. In fact, he never followed unitary or chronologically defined paths, but he revealed himself to be attentive to those languages and expressive forms that allowed him to explore reality in an unprecedented way, alternating or merging an analytical and rational line of investigation with a more expressive and synthetic one, always in strict respect of the emotion in front of nature.
During the summer of 1948, the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti exhibited again at the Gran Premio Forte dei Marmi,
as part of the review of the Italian avant-garde. At this event, the painter once again presented a figure painting and a landscape painting, demonstrating how much he preferred to exhibit less experimental paintings at public events. This would happen again at the V Rome Quadrennial, again in 1948, at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Villa Giulia, the most important national exhibition of figurative art after the Liberation, where he presented Ragazza di casa and a Self-portrait, cultivating his experiments in a more intimate and personal dimension, almost as if it were a secret language waiting for the right moment to manifest itself and be understood by the public.