31 INGRANAGGI MECCANICI - EN

31. Ingranaggi meccanici, 1966, oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm

The vertical composition illustrates a tangle of fantastic machinery immersed in an almost fiery background. The space is closed and oppressive, dominated by the ferrous and circular interlocking of cogwheels and flywheels, cut by vertical planes of pipes and transmission chains. The color palette is characterized by dark, cold and obsessive colors, which stand out against sulfurous yellows and fiery reds, intensifying the sense of danger and unease.

Insights

With the works Simbolismo meccanico, Catarsini begins to represent the machine in a dystopian way, through complex mechanisms that evolve over time. Initially, these works focus attention on the beauty of shapes and colors, appearing almost inoffensive. However, the artist soon introduces elements that generate anxiety for their potential threat to man, woman and nature.

This work from the mid-1960s embodies this darker phase.

This powerful description suggests a pessimistic vision of technological progress, in which the machine, from an object of fascination, is transformed into a potentially destructive and alienating force. The use of contrasting colors and the claustrophobic composition help to convey a strong sense of impending threat.

The stimulus constituted by the research that developed from 1945 to the 1960s and the examples of the most committed innovators of Italian art offered Catarsini those suggestions that led him to the fascinating results of Simbolismo meccanico. This original line of exploration of reality, which finds its premises in a constant problematic dimension of all his art, appears today to our eyes as the outcome of the symbiosis, sometimes ruthless and ferocious, between the logic of the machine and the principle of freedom and dignity of man. This dialectic was already present in his docks, in the enormous hulls of the sailing ships that tower over the caulkers and workers at work in the shipyards, or in the cranes and machinery that tower over the port of Viareggio, or in the threshing machine that dominates Il grano della bonifica lucchese, even if in the works of the 1930s the painter seemed to seek a harmonious and sometimes idyllic relationship between man and machine.

The artist never mythologized the airplane or the automobile, as Marinetti and the futurists did, who imagined, in a wishful way, an Italy projected into a utopian future; the machines he painted in those years were still the slow machines of nineteenth-century culture.

In him, however, the presence of the machine and the mechanical gear also testified to the vocation not to be satisfied with a purely contemplative attitude towards reality and the assiduity in cultivating the spirit of research and the habit of reflection. At the end of the 1940s, this inclination found substance in a trend centered on the representation of imaginary mechanical gears evoking, in their disturbing uselessness, the destructive potential of a technology that is no longer at the service of man, but which resolves itself in its totalizing self-reproduction until reaching, in its unstoppable mutation, the biomechanics of the 1970s.