6 CANTIERE - EN

6.  Cantiere navale  1936 oil on canvas, 78 x 98 cm

This splendid horizontal painting places an imposing sailing ship at the centre of the scene, depicted in three-quarters with the bow oriented towards the right. The dark hull divides the field of vision diagonally, with the tall masts extending beyond the edges of the painting and the bowsprit that seems to slide over the buildings and the distant line of hills, almost as if to split a dense and compact sky of a white-blue. Below the red line of the keel, the industriousness of carpenters and caulkers comes to life, concentrated in the central part. Other workers, in the foreground towards the left, work in the triangular space delimited by the walkways and the path that leads to the shed on the left, whose geometric red-brown façade concludes the composition.

Insights

Towards the mid-1930s, Catarsini’s paintings are characterized by strong brushstrokes that define solid volumes, both in the figures in enigmatic scenes and in the quiet landscapes, where perspective and composition are taken care of and the environment once again becomes the backdrop to human action. In this period, views of the shipyards of Viareggio, as a theater of labor, often appear in his exhibitions. Catarsini had shown interest in this subject since the 1920s, portraying his city through streets, canals and docks, seeing the shipyards as a place of construction of imposing wooden structures. In the summer of 1936, at the Kursaal in Viareggio, he achieved his first success with “Velieri in cantiere”, purchased by the Ministry of Popular Culture for the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. Also in 1936, he exhibited in Seravezza and presented two fresco landscapes in Florence, demonstrating his adherence to the new pictorial trends, also confirmed in religious painting with the mural “Le nozze di Maria” in Viareggio. In the autumn of 1937, he exhibited another “Cantiere” in Naples, where the prows of two large sailing ships tower over the buildings.