Piazza di paese

The painting dates to the time of Marasco’s most enthusiastic adhesion to the Futurist movement, which he identified with the plastic dynamism of Boccioni. In this “village square”, the painter takes Boccioni’s method of de-composition into crude volumes in relief and a jarring movement, which combines in its “simultaneity” scraps of landscape in the background with buildings and figures at various levels.
In this crowded assemblage of plastic forms we recognize some clearly iconic elements, such as the animal crouching in the shadows. This is one of Marasco’s distinctive marks – the inclusion of figurative elements even in strictly Futurist compositions; in fact, even during his Futurist period, Marasco also cultivated figurative painting. The façade of the village church is recognizable, with its rose window, while the greenish, tuber-shaped structures in the upper portion of the work would appear to allude to hills above the houses. The volumes and planes of colour into which the blade-like rays of light are inserted are of definite browns, reminiscent of the artist’s earlier expressionist phase. A tormented sky with rays fanning out from above is at the top.