41 COMPOSIZIONE – EN

41 COMPOSIZIONE - EN

41.  Compositione, 1970, oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm

In this vertical composition the author plays with symbols and signs of reality, through enigmatic combinations of shapes and spatial indicators. On the table in the foreground, at the base of the painting, some objects are arranged: a horizontal frame and a vertical rectangular canvas. White is used in the legs of the table, in the rectangular canvas that is placed on top of it and in the triangle that is superimposed in strong relief. On the triangle is placed a blue sheet of paper, the same color as the window that can be seen on the right. On the sheet is arranged a black-gray leaf that detaches itself from a sprig of green leaves. Two other white leaves are painted on the right with a diluted color that allows the dark background to show through. In the upper part, other leaves detach themselves from a branch, to then blend in with those painted on the back wall.

In this continuous game between painted image and real image, the artist resumes the reflexive intuition to give life to a mise en image in the concrete space of the atelier, a place in which this alienating still life takes shape, made up more of symbolic entities than real ones. The objects become pure compositional pretexts to create an ambiguous short circuit between art and nature, between the two-dimensionality of the surfaces and the three-dimensionality of the spatial indicators of depth, of the multiple perspectives and of the shadows.

Insights

In the mid-1940s, with Reflexism, he had experimented with the decomposition of form and the reversal of planes, also recovering the lines of force and the futurist fragmentation of the image. The gaze in the mirror allowed him to resolve the perspective vision of reality on the plane and to avoid staticity with dynamic tensions entrusted to light-color, in a dialectic that implied a subtle psychological projection and that self-reflexive drive that opened the way to the surrealist poetics and purely abstract experiments of the 1970s, like this one.

During the early Seventies, Catarsini devoted himself to fantastic and abstract compositions created with different techniques and surreal-informal veins or, as in this case, more geometric-figurative. In these works, rational figures are combined with natural elements in a restless synthesis between naturalism and formalism, as was noted at the Salon Babylon in Paris or in the monograph dedicated to him by the Bugatti publishing house or, again, in the exhibition at the Galleria Internazionale in Florence.

According to Franco Solmi, he approached some emerging lines of Italian art, to then distinguish himself, converging and transgressing in a path with continuous gaps, apparently tortuous, but critically readable as long as it is not forcibly traced back to schools or trends, “where transgressions as well as convergences can be understood in the light of a poetics in which symbol and nature intertwine their memorable dialectic.”

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