36 LA MODELLA - EN

36. La modella  1970 mixed technique on cardboard, 70 x 50 cm

The vertical work depicts a young naked woman from the front, half-length; lower down another “she” sketched in burgundy red of which only the breast can be distinguished. The main figure, outlined in black and watercolour with the same burgundy tone, is looking to the left, has an oval face and black hair. Catarsini used this superposition technique to give dynamism and depth to the image, almost as if he wanted to show different phases or perceptions of the same figure. The use of burgundy for both the sketched drawing and the watercolour of the main figure creates an interesting chromatic bond.

Insights

Probably made around 1970, it is part of the rich production of nudes by its author. The figure of the model, at least since Ingres’ Baigneuse de Valpinçon, has made explicit its nature as a privileged artistic object in the exercise of pictorial composition. Catarsini also often exploits the subject, which he treats both as a formal exercise and to paint works in which the poseuse becomes a woman. In his drawings the body of the model can be manipulated, deformed and synthesized in the graphic exercise, like that of an inanimate mannequin, finding its place in the vast theater of nature as well as in that of the mechanical device. The 1950s and 1960s were marked by his intense activity in the graphic and pictorial fields.

The investigation of the various figurative techniques was not for him a pure exercise in style, but the discipline, often painful, through which he investigated the methods of restitution of the forms of reality,

trying to obtain the perception of color through chiaroscuro and tonal modulations, hatching,

shading, thickening and shaping with graphite, charcoal, ink. This way of proceeding

will later be covered in colors in his oils, in watercolor drawings or made with mixed techniques, which

make it more evident in their nature as means of graphic-pictorial figuration.

This predisposition to graphic research is what Enrico Dei calls the “religion of his drawing”, cultivated since the beginning of his artistic activity and teaching, the point of balance and the hub of all his activity.

In the small presentation of his solo show at the Centro Versiliese delle arti in Viareggio in 1954, the painter

will write how, among the “monochrome greyness” of the monotypes “there is interspersed the stain of the color of my paintings; small things, sometimes only rapid impressions (…) from which one can learn the anxiety that afflicts every artist in the search for a more energetic, more communicative language”.

The spirit of this research can also be captured in the graphic superimpositions that characterize this drawing, in which the compositional meditation is stratified in the doubling of the model’s image.