26 TRE FIGURE FANTASTICHE - EN
26.
On the left – Figura fantastica seduta, 1960, ink on paper, 37 x 26 cm;
In the center – Animale fantastico, 1960, ink and watercolour on paper, 37 x 25 cm;
On the right – Figura fantastica, 1960, ink on paper, 35 x 20 cm
These three vertical works, exhibited in the same frame, feature two female figures facing each other on the sides and a rooster in left profile in the center. They belong to a series of ink drawings dedicated to both women and animals. The women, one seated and the other standing, are represented through a complex interweaving of lines and geometric shapes, combined with different aesthetic strategies that define their posture and gender, inviting an imaginative deconstruction for a full understanding. In contrast, the rooster is made in color, while maintaining a similar stylistic structure and an inexpressive gaze. It stands out for its majesty, its imaginative plumage and its colorful tail. The use of color for this male figure seems to emphasize its vitality and strength, creating a strong visual contrast with the enigmatic abstraction of the female figures.
Insights
Catarsini is pushing the boundaries of figurative representation, inviting us to an active process of interpretation and visual reconstruction. The use of geometric elements and stylistic variety help to create enigmatic figures open to multiple readings. It is interesting to note how the expressionless gaze is a common stylistic element, as will be found in the works of Mechanical Symbolism of the last period, perhaps suggesting a symbolic interpretation that goes beyond simple representation.
Between 1957 and 1958, Catarsini exhibited frequently in Florence, where he was awarded prizes in competitions organized by the Società Belle Arti e Circolo degli Artisti fiorentino, won the Olivetti Prize at the III National Competition of Contemporary Portraiture at the Casa di Dante and exhibited at the first exhibition I Maestri e i Pittori Toscani Contemporanei at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna.
In Rome, however, he was listed among the members of the Accademia Tiberina and President Gronchi appointed him Cavaliere della Repubblica in 1959, when he was present at the VIII Quadriennale d’arte and received a gold medal at the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Figurativa at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni.
Starting in 1960, Catarsini began to merge symbolic-mechanical research with an original surrealist streak. The mechanical anatomy of the female body that characterizes the two lateral drawings appears, therefore, as a further declination of the idea of the woman who becomes a mechanical organism capable of posing with typically feminine movements, a figure often represented as a prisoner and victim of the machine and the gear. In him, femininity is experienced symbolically as an absolute principle of humanity, even when it is represented with a caricatural language with an ironic and playful tone, almost as if it were a divertissement or the ostentatious trivialization of an ethical theme that instead appeared to him to be fundamental. According to Dino Carlesi, this “phantasmagoria” highlights “(…) the gravity of a society that was relying on the destructive materiality of the machine, on its fearful gears, on its mechanisms, causing man mortifications and alienations instead of liberating and exalting him.” (1)
The same argument can also be applied to the figure of the animal that occupies the central part of the triptych, in which the influence of Aldemir Martins, a Brazilian painter awarded at the 1956 Biennale and hosted by him in Viareggio in 1960, is more evident, also due to the chromatic characterizations of the drawing. The artist, stimulated by the novelty of Martins’ figurative imagination, will create a series of works in ink and watercolour, with human figures and fantastic animals, characterised by mechanical deformations and stylisations and by an innovative style compared to his usual expressive methods.