Project Description

FRANCESCO CAMARDA ( Palermo 1886 – 1962 ), Secrets.

Charcoal drawing on paper cm 25 x 22  signed lower right.

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“Few artists I came to know as the Camarda remained tied with undaunted steadfastness to the early dreams of art and the first feelings of beauty. He won that first national contest (first prize for the pensioner in Rome, editor’s note) with some small pictures of naked children on the beach, on a pleasant background of the sea: during the two years of pensioner whatever academic commission say to rebuke him for a choice oriented mostly for different and “more serious” subjects, he was decided not to abandon his children, its sea, its blue.

[…] The nudes of Camarda always have a great fullness of living reality and fleshy in the simple representation devoid of novelistic emphasis: it is the real speaking voice of poetry and simplicity. […] And it raises a lot of emotions, the sweet singing of the rosy flesh of children evoked with so subtle spirituality in the frame iridescent of the opal waves and emerald lawns. ”

With these words full of admiration Guido Marangoni reviewd the Francesco Camarda’s work in an article published in the monthly magazine «Emporium» of September 1931, that issue which had on the cover just the Camarda’s painting Confidenze, to which the drawing proposed here is ispired.

FRANCESCO-CAMARDA

The art of Camarda, whose many works are held at the Gallery of Modern Art in Palermo, defies easy classifications: excellent illustrator and lively colorist, devoted himself to the figure – nude and portrait – and to the representation of animals, painting already brought to the dignity of “genre” by brothers Palizzi, representatives of a painting interpreted as a realistic investigation which will have sort of a influence on others Sicilian painters, first of all, Francesco Lojacono.