39 CANTIERI - EN

39. Cantieri 1955, oil on canvas board, 30 x 36 cm

This small horizontal work contains, like a miniature, the essential characteristics of the old shipyards of Viareggio, described by Catarsini with a rigorous sense of space and with poetic atmosphere and colors: in the foreground the stretch of water of the canal where four small white sailing boats are moored with the bow facing forward and the masts that reach the edge of the work crossing the blue sky in the background; in the background some low storage buildings and behind, in the center, the tall shed where the larger boats are built. In the distance on the right a reddish line, perhaps the roofs of the houses in the dock. The chromatic combinations of red, green, blue, yellow and white, the outlines that delimit the volumes, are made even more vivid by the luminosity that invades the painting, that luminosity that Catarsini spoke about in the RAI interview of 1980 “… when the sun throws its luminosity on these whites there is no way, there is no color … not even if the sky were to become black …”

Insights

Mario De Micheli writes that “Catarsini was born a painter in the air, in the light and in the landscape of Viareggio”; his activity begins in the dock, within the context of the art of Livorno and Versilia, and he will always return to the shipyards of Viareggio throughout his life to paint bright and sunny views like this one from 1955 which, in the clear beauty of the blues and whites – so difficult to render in the full light of the morning – highlights that naturalistic constant that stimulated him to represent an exciting reality, despite the mechanistic obsessions and deafening noises that afflicted modern shipyards. Along the canals of his city he knew how to rediscover the silence that can be felt in this view, where only the color makes itself heard, bringing the sweet sound of the air, the light and the sea. Catarsini’s language is always linked to reality. The study of the skeleton of reality is what he has, since the beginning, pursued with constancy and stubbornness through drawing, defining the space or shaping a volume through lines and hatchings of shadows, without virtuosity, without any formal complacency.

Signs and lines support the structure of a landscape, or of a body, as well as that of his most experimental paintings, in which we find, as Tommaso Paloscia claims, “the vertical crossings of the canvas, or diagonally, which are the same as the mast of a boat and the sails with their geometric shapes”.

With constant methods, the artist outlines both the appearance of a vessel and that of a mechanical apparatus, giving continuity to the way of inventing compositional solutions in situations that are also clearly differentiated from each other. In each of his creations we can grasp the figural frame on which his landscapes, his still lifes or his portraits come to life, the most evidently realistic works as well as the most experimental ones.