40 IL PATINO ROSSO - EN

40. Patino rosso, 1950-60 oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

This horizontal sea view intrigues and captures attention for its chromatic combination and imaginative construction: a horizontal line divides the work almost into equal parts. At the base is a stretch of sand and above is the sky. A solitary red patino on the right, seen from the side and in perspective, filled in in red and outlined by a thin and summary black contour line, seems to float on the sand. The boat, a seaside subject that returns in his other paintings, here appears as a melancholic wreck abandoned on the now deserted beach, among the rare bushes of vegetation translated into almost informal signs. The surface of the sea extends to the upper edge of the painting, painted with large horizontal bands of blue spread with flat brushstrokes. The painting is characterized by some vertical and oblique crossings of the canvas, almost like cuts traced with white lines that cage the view of the sea and the beach.

Insight

The poetic vision of the patin, or the memory of this vision, appears filtered by a linear-informal frame that oscillates between geometric rationalism and the surreal automatism of a writing made from the traces of his gestures; this rarefaction of the sign, typical of the dialectic between natural forms and abstraction, constitutes one of the artist’s original traits and will re-emerge also in the Seventies.

As attested by the labels applied to the back, the canvas was exhibited at Palazzo Paolina, in the anthological exhibition of 1983 and at the National Exhibition “Premio Pontedera”. Considering that Catarsini took part in the exhibitions of the Tuscan town from 1953 to 1964 and that he exhibited here at the national exhibitions of 1955-56, 1957 and 1961-62, according to Tommaso Paloscia the painting could be dated to the second half of the Fifties.