Mario Sironi
The Dramatic Vision

5th October – 30th November 2002
The exhibition, curated by Luigi Cavallo, is composed of over 30 paintings and drawings, which span the Thirties to the Fifties.
“Sironi lived through our century along the lines which bring Futurism to Metaphysics to arrive at the 1900s, and from there to informal art. His work has such dignity and his images are so vigorous that he is not merely a witness of time, a figurative commentator on the vast tragedy present in contemporary affairs, but also a creator of a new epos which has been obtained through civil and existential difficulties. He gave the art of painting a lesson in independence and pride, with a relentless and enduring investigation into motives, forms, material evidence and inventions. So enduring that even the last stretch, the Fifties, brought a great richness to his composition: it was the conclusion of a poetic that ties the modern nucleus of painting to the ancient and archaic complex sense of depiction. This was accomplished with a great understanding of internal relationships, assonances, superpositions… The surface of the paintings is full of reflections, of back lighting, of startling illumination; the vibrant movement of pastes applied with spatulas and brushes stirs up an intimate magma of acute experiences. Tempera reinforced with energy is pursued by the sound structure of the masses, the intersection of levels of sound and of geometrical fields. The voyage is fraught, and implicates the spectator in a reading which has many different emotional and formal levels… it is not an invitation to contemplation, but a tense, rusty phrasing, with colours that rise up out of the material, as though a piece of existence, pain, solitude, desolation and love itself were deposited there. Like molten lava, the material spreads over the surface, corroding it, corrupting it; it becomes an impenetrable flow in which the artist finds a sort of refuge”.

Biography of Mario Sironi

Catalogue: 30x21.5 cm, 112 pages; 32 colour reproductions.
Text by Luigi Cavallo and Andrea Alibrandi. Edizioni Il Ponte, Florence. Price €18