Really, you don’t know where to start. It is difficult to tell the great exhibition that Palazzo Reale di Milano dedicates to Felice Casorati (Novara, 1883 – Turin, 1963). Over one hundred works in a path that enhances the differences between one period and the other of a long career and at the same time makes a continuity of inspiration, sensitivity, visionary and incredibly unique expression touch with the eyes. The painter who wanted to “paint his thoughts” (he said), was perfectly successful in his intent, also having the ability to always be himself. His is a sort of existential philosophy, which does not need words: in the paintings of Casorati you can also see everything that is not seen, or rather what, at first glance, does not seem to be depicted.
He had the extraordinary ability to always go beyond the canvas, to put attention, through his famous suspended atmospheres, the reflective melancholy, the harmony with the historical periods (think of the two world wars crossed by his painting), the comparisons with reality (without ever being succubus). All inspired by his attendance of music (he should have become a pianist if he had not stopped a nervous exhaustion which, fortunately, diverted him to painting), attended every day in his first person in his study in Turin, where piano, scores, canvases lived And brushes, so much so that in some of the works, the most “mystical”, it seems to hear it.
In the face of stylistic changes (in the use of color, in the definition of bodies and spaces and therefore of the perspectives, in the choice of mysterious allegories), Casorati has maintained his basic pictorial creed straight, the one that gives common substance to all his works. Promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Cultura and produced by Palazzo Reale and Marsilio Arte (which has published a catalog that will remain fundamental) in collaboration with the Casorati Archive, the exhibition, entitled simply “Casorati”, is curated by Giorgina Bertolino, Fernando Mazzocca And Francesco Poli, all of the major scholars of the Piedmontese artist.
Thanks to a simple set -up, which gives more value to the works that stand out on walls by choice never crowded, the exposure winds divided a little by chronology a little by themes. Casorati does not reach straight to the great masterpieces such as the portraits of Anna Maria de Lisi or Silvana Notes (women existed only in her fantasy), not by chance works that has always kept for herself, but advances and grows in a path made even more jagged From the continuous transfers of the official father: Novara, Sassari, Padua, Naples, Verona to the final landing in Turin in 1919 after the tragic and unexpected death of the parent.
Always inspired by classicism (from the beloved Piero della Francesca to Mantegna and Botticelli, and also Antonello da Messina for the portraits of the Gualino family), never being trivially neoclassical (the adjective offended him), contaminated from time to time with impressionism , symbolism, magical realism (which was appropriate to him), had evident contacts and sometimes declared with the works of Klimt, Kandiskij, Cézanne, Gauguin; And (the curators forgive me!) In the latest works I also see connections, always in his own way, with Bacon. Everything without ever depersonaling.
Friend of Piero Gobetti, who wrote illuminating pages on him, participated in the initiatives of the “group of the twentieth century”, founded by Margherita Sarfatti, the Jewish intellectual who was a lover of Mussolini and who was an acute art critic, never Thinking, however, to join the group of “return to order” in painting; Lonely in the way of painting, but open to sociality (after the post -war period he was also mayor of a small Piedmontese town), he opened his school, participated several times in the Venice Biennale and made exhibitions in various parts of the world.
Given that not knowing where to start, we have come down to here, a little known work must be reported because it has not been exposed for a long time: “Annunciation”, an oil on the table of 1927. Far in this case with classic, Casorati calls , which inaugurates a full use of colors here, paints two characters (one standing from behind, presumably the archangel, the other seated, consequently the Madonna), divided by the mirror anti A wardrobe, in a room where, as can be seen from the shadows, penetrates the sun. In that mirror the religious mystery and the pictorial enigma are concentrated, as always with an open solution, which give space to the personal intuition of the person who looks. The work that the curators chose for the cover of the catalog and approached the famous “Platonic conversation”, in which a man entirely dressed up to the hat looks at a completely naked woman lying on a bed, who together lead us to the idea of one Philosophical speculation, a sort of research on why harmony represented by the woman, who, in my opinion, is art, naked because it does not need to add anything to herself.
There is also another work, which affects because relatively far from the style of Casorati: “Tarning to the target”, a tempera painted in 1919 (the same year of the very different “Anna Maria de Lisi”). Arranged on overlapping and unusually colorful files compared to the period, with bright shades that stand out on the black background, the targets of an amusement park are painted: animals, puppets, warriors and more. The whole has something unpredictably abstract, as it was noticed at the time, and I believe there is a very personal “reinterpretation” of Kandinskij.
Among the other many works, of an exhibition to be enjoyed more than to see, a report at least must go to the plaster bas -reliefs, with which Casorati decorated the private theater of Casa Gualino, the patrons to which he had dedicated the portraits he sent to the Biennale. Valuable diversions of a pictorial career that has crossed, in addition to personal tragedies, the fascist period, including racial laws, and many war events. The painter absorbed all the pains and all the absurdities of the wars and reacted with his suspended times, with the representation of glances, gestures and positions never contemplative, sometimes strong in a dignified pain and in any case full of questions, but more often With the attitude (Casorati sometimes has been put in parallel with Porandello) of those who look at the enigma of human actions knowing that they cannot find the solution.
