45.  Marina invernale, 1959, oil on board, 30 x 40 cm

In the winter seascape, the band at the bottom in the foreground is the sand that, as it rises, is enriched with dune vegetation that almost prevents us from seeing the sea and the huts. The line of the sea is thus reduced in thickness and immediately the sky begins. Catarsini juxtaposes the colors of the dunes and the huts with the pink clouds of the sunset over the sea and the entire painting is invaded by that strange, sweet and enveloping brightness.

Insights

Nature, silence and the uncontaminated beauty of the landscape are at the centre of these two horizontal views of Versilia beaches. They evoke a wild image, as if seaside tourism had not yet altered their purity, bringing them back to the appearance of the early years of the last century. Both small horizontal works are characterised by a strong atmosphere, with the spaces defined by horizontal bands that cross the painting, dividing it and outlining the setting.

The two seascapes are painted with quick, synthetic and apparently sloppy brushstrokes in a writing that, in some places, borders on the informal. Catarsini uses the expressiveness of gesture and colour to communicate the feeling experienced in front of a landscape in the process of transformation, as if the poetry of those places now needed new forms of expression capable of crystallising the lost beauty.

During the second half of the 1950s, Catarsini took part in the VII and VIII Quadriennale in Rome, with Nuns on the Beach and Skeletons on the Beach, in the Modigliani Prize in Livorno, in the national portrait exhibitions in Florence, in the National Exhibition of Pure Art in Naples, in the Ramazzotti Prize in Milan and in the collective exhibition in Lindau.