Project Description
Corrado Cagli (Ancona 1910 – Rome 1976), Untitled
Waxy pastels on paper of 25 x 27 cm signed (Cagli) and dated (55) lower left. Thanks to the Cagli archive for a positive opinion on the authenticity of the work.
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«Things, that is, and stylistic ideas and solutions – nature and culture – are a single field of investigation and discovery, the total forms on which the creative personality of the artist must act. And it is this, ultimately, that conditions and transfigures and reinvents them. Cagli’s design is as clear as his knowledge and awareness of how to act on forms, of taking possession of them as communication elements of his intellectual and sentimental ruin, is clear. It is a simple and absolute language, an Enlightenment speech, a park of adjectives, all of meaningful words: snappy definitions that imply an extraordinary complexity of philological and empirical, cultural and intuitive references. It has the perfect purity of humanistic dictates, which do not dogmatically close aspects of life in academic affirmations, but which reveal, from time to time, with extreme perspicuity, all the data of a lucid knowledge of the truth, intended as stages and ideas of a inexhaustible investigation operation, always open. It has the mysterious beauty of the mirror, the disturbing, yet rationalizable magic of a prismatic screen. “
With these words, Franco Russoli synthesized the artistic research of Corrado Cagli, a central figure for the abstract trends that characterized the aesthetic trends of the second post-war period, developing works of great originality and theorising an extension of the “primordio” that influenced, for example, the abstract turn of Capogrossi.
Just a “prismatic screen”, an image used by Russoli to define the magical rationalism of the abstract painter Cagli, constitutes the noumenon of the composition presented here, performed by the painter from the Marche region in the second half of the 1950s, in which the images of the Marche countryside, projected in a naive vision, they let us guess the presence of man with only the traces of his passage: the plowing, the abandoned cockpits, the polychromatic plot of the land. The lively eclecticism of Cagli that squads at the turn of the sixties is testified by the numerous exhibitions that span the decade. Numerous in Italy, more than 30, the events that – with personal or collective exhibitions – pay homage to the different fields of interest of the artist whose name, known in Europe (exhibitions in Paris, Liverpool, Dublin, Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Hamburg, Munich, Athens) now resounds in the most distant points of the earth (Tehran, Tokyo, Algiers, Sidney, New York). Participation in the XXXII Venice Biennale in 1964, in which it is present with a personal room, also contributes to making it known to the general public, consecrating its international success.
