Paesaggio

One sees no mimetic forms of the natural world in these vivid colours, alternating between bursts of light and darkening ravines in shadow, between sombre blacks and fiery reds, rendered freely and with gestural immediacy. Beginning in 1950-51, Corpora’s Neo-Cubism exploded into shards and fragments, which blunted and almost concealed the sliver of reality from which the image derives. This is what happens here, in this work exhibited for the first time in 1954, and christened – but perhaps later on in a move that was not unusual for the artist – with a naturalistic title, dispersing the memory of the natural event that was its remote trigger.
In 1951 Corpora and Music won the Premio Parigi, which was assigned in Cortina d’Ampezzo by an international jury; thanks to that prize, he was able to organize a major one-man show the following year in the Galerie de France, where one of his paintings was acquired by the museum of the City of Paris. For an Italian painter, his work was received unusually well in Paris and he accordingly gained recognition in the European capital which was the birthplace and point of reference for all the modernity to which Corpora referred. A success, this, which definitively launched the artist, more than his participation in 1952 in the Venice Biennale with the Group of Eight, into the golden circle of international painting.