22 NUDO ROSSO IN POLTRONA - EN
22. Nudo rosso in poltrona, 1945, oil on cardboard, 29 x 24 cm
The work is part of a series of small-sized works, often painted on cardboard, which constitute the first nucleus of that production that, later, will be classified by the artist with the term “Riflesismo”.
The vertical work is presented to us as painted on the framed canvas visible on the easel. We are therefore in Catarsini’s Atelier and the image reflects in the glass of another painting, in an alienating process, almost an original mise en abyme in which the painting reflects other simultaneously assembled ones. It depicts two nude models with black hair portrayed in the Atelier: in the foreground on the right the first,
half-lying on her right side on the green armchair is painted in bright red. The figure is oblique with her head at the top right and her legs at the bottom left and seems to be conversing with the other model, placed on the left side of the painting in the background; is sitting in profile to the right occupies the left part of the painting, is painted in dark red and is sitting on a chair in profile to the right. The latter has her face turned towards her companion. Between the two, in the background, a light wall and a blue wood-burning stove. The two figures are crossed by brush strokes that define their position and the surrounding environment full of colors. Profiled by a nervous contour line, these nudes are striking for the rendering of volumes and shadows through the thickening of the charcoal and for the speed of the hatching.
Insights
Like the other nudes of the same series, the composition falls within the category of what could be considered “academies”, that is, drawings in which the artist studies poses, lighting and modeling of the figure.
The colors, typical of the post-war period, also characterize the landscapes or still lifes of these years. The green armchair appears in many of his paintings created in his Atelier in the attic of the Villa Museo Paolina Bonaparte
The Atelier was a meeting place for fellow artists, friends, admirers and collectors, whom the artist enjoyed warning with an inscription on the door: “Whoever enters honors me, whoever does not enter does me a favor”, a clear invitation to avoid wasters. But above all it was his creative microcosm of these images characterized by the reddish tones of the flesh, the intense blues, the purples and the oranges spread through separate and juxtaposed brushstrokes of dazzling and luminous color. Here he played with his works, making them interact as pure pretexts, going so far as to intersect or superimpose elements such as the figure of a fish with that of the model lying on the armchair. The artist seems to rediscover the pleasure of painting after leaving behind the war period and the duties of an official art like that of Cremona, which is the antipodes of a small painting like this, both in size and in the taste for deformation. The anti-naturalism of the color, the flavor of a trendy painting, updated on national and European dynamics, reveal not only the desire for novelty, but almost the awareness of his own creative abilities and the strength that he could have displayed if in the previous twenty years he had been able to look freely at the wider international panorama.
Catarsini, who at twenty years of age had not been able to escape the charm of a linguistic revolution like the Futurist one, trying to emancipate himself from Viani, at the Venice Biennale of 1948 and then at the Forte dei Marmi exhibition of the same year, will look at the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, between new realism and neo-cubist research, with the sincere need to innovate, while maintaining a strong link with the Tuscan tradition.
Riflessismo bears witness to a moment of great creative ferment for Catarsini, a bold and conceptually stimulating exploration that leads him to define his own very personal artistic language under the banner of “absolute freedom”, a prelude to what will happen a few years later with his Simbolismo meccanico.