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Dec 23 - Jan 6, 2001 |
Between reality & style
Carlo Carrą's three seasons on display in Rome's new gallery
Originally Published: 2001-12-09
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One of the 60 works displayed in Omaggio a Carra in Rome
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A little house as a side wing, a small pine tree, a barren ridge with the dark mouth of a cave, and the slate grey sea outlining a boundless horizon. These "four words of painting" define Pine by the Sea, the work by which Carlo Carrą would understand, in his own words, "clearly what I could ask of nature and take from it."
In 1921, at 40 years of age, Carrą came to discover this streamlined style, summarizing shapes and colours in the order of rigidly geometrical constructions that would accompany him for another half century. This style was incredibly consistent in its establishment of an idea of painting as "plastic order," and found in landscapes its ideal frame of expression and in seascapes a crowning achievement.
From 1926 onwards, after he discovered Forte dei Marmi and the sweet melancholy of the Tuscan coast, those seascapes would become the absolute protagonists of Carrą's art. They would become almost a paradigm of an artist who contemplates Nature, tames it (toning down the strong feelings it raises, through essential shapes and colours), and turns it into "a poem full of space and dream," capturing the relationship between "the need of identification with things and the need of abstraction."
Seascape with Lighthouse, painted in 1962, is particularly representative of this artistic quest, with its immovable horizontal architectures re-establishing a balance broken by the vertical lighthouse and leading to the white sail on the right, as if it contained the mystery of the sea, its being infinite and at the same time in constant transformation.
This painting, with some 60 other artworks by the same author, is on display in an exhibition entitled Omaggio a Carrą ("A Tribute to Carrą"), which opens a new gallery in Rome, Studio d'Arte Campaiola. This is Rome's largest exhibition venue (800 square metres) and it harbours the ambitious objective of becoming a reference for artistic life in Rome. Owner Giuseppe Campaiola (one of Rome's most renowned gallery owners since the mid-Sixties, and a friend of Renato Guttuso, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, and Alberto Moravia) could hardly choose a better subject as the first in a series of anthological exhibitions devoted to the great artists of the 20th century.
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