43 ULISSE - EN

43. Ulisse, 1950, oil on plywood, 70.5 x 99.5 cm

The horizontal work represents a sea view with the sandy strip at the bottom, a line that delimits the sea about halfway through the painting, the strip of sea with a small sailing boat and a promontory in the distance to the right and finally the sky that occupies the upper half of the painting.

The Homeric hero is standing in the foreground on the left of the painting and facing forward; he has the appearance of a vàgero, a vagabond shipwrecked on a Versilia beach among the wreckage left by the storm, as if the sea had abandoned him after having “worn” him, a wreck himself with his face and hair the

same dark grey color as his approximate clothing.

The shaggy human form wanders lost on the sand, among the brushstrokes of color, among the signs and traces of a painting as rapid as it is effective in expressing the anxiety of man thrown into the world, in search of the meaning of his being in nature. The colors are mixed with darker shades to obtain a dramatic effect of the ground and a little lighter with a few brushstrokes in the looming sky.

Ulysses is an emblematic work of a period in which the author moves in the European artistic horizon seeking new pictorial guises, also expressing his anxieties through a deformed writing, as if reality were subjected to an internal pressure that intends to manifest the existential charge through the strength of the sign.

Insights

1950 is a fundamental year for Catarsini, both with regard to the exhibition path and with regard to

his artistic activity. At the Third Interprovincial Exhibition of the Tirreno in Lucca, the jury, composed of Felice Casorati, Raffaele De Grada and Publio Morbiducci, highlighted his Sede di canottieri. The same year he exhibited the painting Le sartine at the National Painting Award Città di Gallarate, created to establish the Civic Gallery of Modern Art, participated in the National Painting Exhibition Golfo della Spezia and in the IV National Michetti Award in Francavilla al mare.

At the XXV Venice Biennale, his Cantiere was also admired by Carlo Carrà who commented positively on his work, recommending paying close attention to it and adding that “his painting will certainly have a cultural, artistic and collector following”. The Biennale that year hosted a retrospective on Viani for which the artist published a note in the magazine Ausonia.

At his personal exhibition in Lucca, Michele Biancale captured the relationship between his painting and that of Viani, underlining that from the canvases of the former, however, emerges a Viareggio that is “less mystical and less dramatic, less pathetic and apocalyptic” than that of the latter” and “more tranquil, serene, welcoming”.

This judgment confirms how his choices for public exhibitions tended to favor paintings that were more in tune with the public’s tastes, less experimental and dramatic than another aspect of his figurative production, well represented by this Ulysses, painted in 1950, which instead allows the painter’s neo-expressionist streak and Viani’s expressive roots to emerge, albeit updated in the light of a new realism.