44 GASOMETRI - EN

44.  Gasometri 1955-60 oil on canvas, 40 x 60 cm

Like many other cities, Viareggio also had its own gas storage and distribution plant for public and private use. This horizontal work has a spatial scansion formed by bands that cross the canvas from one side to the other: in the lower foreground the band with a neglected land rendered with dark spots, mixed with the green and yellow of burnt grass. A distanced blue-grey wall as long as the canvas acts as an element of visual separation and delimits the depot where you can see a tall gasometer in the center and another further away on the left. The rest is occupied by chimneys and other minor constructions that help define an industrial landscape with a leaden sky.

Catarsini wanders in search of atmospheres of industrial arcadia, of the relics of a recent past in which people looked with trust to the machine.

Insights

The gasometer now appears as an ancient giant defending itself from nature with a wall, in a poetic vision obtained once again through the beauty of the colors, tones and shades of greens, yellows and blues saturated with light; the industrial complex seems to be transfigured and reality becomes fairy-tale-like. In the silence of this imaginary view, man’s creatures magically become elements of the natural landscape, just as the tubes and gears of his mechanical-symbolist paintings become trunks, branches and flashes of light in the process of naturalization of the mechanical artifice, which is sublimated and purified in the catharsis of the artistic operation.