Porto

Girders, scaffolding, other indefinite structures evoking the intense activity of a cargo shipping port. A work scene, therefore – but everything takes place on the surface, no perspective, a summarily sketched background indicated by a few pure colours (ochre for the land, beneath the blue of the sea), unrelated to any plausible representation of nature.
In the early 1950s, just reaching his full artistic maturity, Turcato combined his vocation to depict themes evocative of work and the working class – as in his short, intense cycles of Miniere (“Mines”) and Scenderie (“Mineshafts”) – with painterly instruments deriving from abstraction, suggested in this instance not only by Magnelli but by the Futurism of Balla (the master of the Italian avant-garde almost forgotten in the immediate post-war years and rediscovered by the young artists of the Forma group), from whom Turcato seems to have borrowed his brilliant colourism and the simultaneous representation of different events.