51. Compositione con nudo verde, 1951, oil on hardboard, 100 x 70 cm

The vertical work features a marked division into two halves. On the left, in the foreground, a nude female figure stands out, painted green and portrayed standing up to mid-thigh. Her posture is characterized by arms in an asymmetrical position along her sides and a head slightly inclined to the right, with short black hair. Her gaze, turned towards the observer, expresses astonished tranquility against a pink background.

The right part of the painting is dominated by vertical mechanical gears, black with white edges, which could also suggest the shape of a robot with a gear wheel as a head. Indefinite black bands bordered in white, arranged in various directions, could represent limbs. The background of this mechanical figure features touches of pink and gray.

The artist creates a sense of disorientation and disturbance through the chromatic choices and the anatomical rendering of the model, who almost seems to escape from a world dominated by the machine. At the bottom right, some signs recall the style of the low houses of Viareggio.

Insights

The research that characterized the development of Italian art after the Second World War pushed Catarsini to renew his production, not for fashion, but for an intimate ethical need that led him to the “mechanical” compositions begun around 1950 and subsequently declined in various ways until the 1980s.

In hindsight, the painter would define with the term Simbolismo meccanico the set of these original elaborations that arise from a problematic predisposition, characteristic of his artistic inclination, here originating from the awareness of the conflictual and necessary coexistence between man and machine.

Catarsini’s reflection in the 1950s and 1960s, oscillating between admiration for human ingenuity and attraction to the potential and contradictions inherent in technological progress on the one hand and awareness of the conflict between nature and technology on the other, resonates today with even greater force.

Let’s just think about the environmental challenges we are facing, the debate on artificial intelligence and its impact on work and society. Catarsini’s intuition, which he translated into Mechanical Symbolism, seems almost prophetic, already grasping the complex dynamics that characterize our present.

It is remarkable how Alfredo Catarsini was able to intercept themes of such universal scope and still so urgent. His “thematic bifurcation” no longer appears as a simple artistic dichotomy, but as a lucid analysis of the forces at play in the contemporary world.

In Catarsini’s painting, the vindication of the dignity of the human being is almost always represented in an exemplary way by the woman, the central figure of his poetics, who in a series of his works appears as if imprisoned in the gears of a world that she herself has helped to generate.

This work also reveals the expressionist root of his art, which loads the sign with dramatic tensions comparable to that existential realism that will develop shortly thereafter.

The artist’s creations in the very early 1950s are characterized by the simultaneous presence of diversified linguistic choices, ranging from figurative to abstraction, from more traditional subjects to those marked by experimental research or paintings that seek juxtapositions or intersections between various representative typologies. In this framework, as has been said, between enigmatic mechanisms, landscape pieces and female nude, an artistic genre he constantly explored.

The work was exhibited in 1982 at the first Exhibition entirely dedicated to these works – Alfredo Catarsini, Simbolismo meccanico, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara with texts by Franco Solmi and Marilena Pasquali