52. Mare agitato 1969, oil on hardboard, cm 36 x 50

The subject of this horizontal work is a solitary patino in the center of the work and in the foreground, lying on the beach; it is a recurring subject in Catarsini’s production as is the composition of the seascapes divided into horizontal bands (beach at the bottom, sea and then sky). In the background the line of the shoreline and the rough sea is defined by the abundance of the color white and on the marine horizon you can glimpse in the distance on the left a sailboat tossed by the waves. Dark colors, with flashes of white, make the sea and sky uniform while the sand remains in shadow. In this case the patino becomes the protagonist of a winter seascape that well represents the artist’s tendency to shy away from the views of summer Viareggio, preferring the restitution of an uninhabited and wild Versilia coast that hosts significant presences such as the patino, a residue of a past holiday season and a symbol of those who remain on land while a sail on the horizon fearlessly ploughs through the turbulent sea.

Insights

It is no coincidence that the painting, although made in the late 1960s, was repeatedly exhibited

during the early 1980s, when it was defined, at the Grande Salle of the Chamber of Commerce at the Italian Embassy in Paris, as “le dernier romantique de la peinture italienne”.

If we can talk about romanticism, we must do so by thinking of the expressiveness of the sign and color, of the formal simplifications where things are rendered through summary and tumultuous brush strokes that unify the texture of the beach, the sea and the sky with a ‘sloppy’, almost informal process. For Catarsini these choices are nothing more than ways of expressing the never lost love towards places that, even if irremediably changed, managed to preserve the trace of their poetry, as if the beauty of those places needed an expressive form that could find it, beyond the metamorphosis of the landscape, in the sign as a trace of the artist’s feeling.