24 TORO - EN

24.  Toro 1962, oil on canvas, 50 x 30 cm

This vertical work features a bull in a frontal position, facing directly at the observer in an attitude of expectation. Its nostrils and horns are decorated in white. The animal’s body is depicted leaning back three-quarters to the right and is painted in black on a white background. This figure is inserted within a network of arches, circles and lines, an element that once again underlines the relationship between the animal’s anatomy and a geometric universe.

Insights

The original monochrome highlights a process of formal synthesis; the exploration of this line of research continues throughout the decade and develops, through figurative variants, both on the graphic side and on the more exquisitely pictorial side, through an investigation that also unfolds in the technical field, characterized by great freedom in the use of tools and writing methods that also interpret more traditional subjects.

The painting is part of a series of nine canvases of similar dimensions exhibited in Munich in 1964, as part of a group exhibition set up at the Atelier Monpti Gallery and organized by the Italian Cultural Institute of the city for the Atelier Munchen Schwabing Prize 1964, in which he was awarded the Dante Alighieri Prize.

It seems that Catarsini continues his exploration of form and space, applying an analytical approach also in the representation of this animal figure, integrating geometric elements into the composition. It is interesting to note how he uses the chromatic contrast of black on white to define the powerful figure of the bull.

In 1960, at the National Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Florence he presents Sintesi della caccia and is among the organizers in Viareggio. The following year he competes for the National Landscape Prize Autostrada del Sole, announced by the Quadriennale and produces writings and drawings for the Agenda published by Vallecchi. In 1961 he began to collaborate with “La Nazione”, for the column “I bozzetti di Alfredo Catarsini” and took part in the VI National Competition of Contemporary Portraiture in Florence at the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

In an anthology of his at the Galleria del Babuino in Rome he presented 60 works characteristic of the realist, reflexist and neo-surrealist tendencies.