Paesaggio futurista

Despite its small size, probably because in reality it was a sketch, this is an intense painting. The colours are heavy but animated by violent contrasts between complementary tones (above all reds and greens), and they saturate the forms fanning out in space. The space is shot through by a “universal” dynamism that takes the Boccionian model towards the cosmic metaphysics that would characterize Prampolini’s later works – assuming that the date in the lower right-hand corner (1917) is true and that the painting is not touched by the vein of “Aeropittura” that would mark the second Futurism. Actually, following the title and reading the work as a “futurist landscape,” we seem to have an aerial view of sea, meadows and mountains. But it is impossible to define the naturalistic reference of the forms – roundish, geometrical, or divided into triangular portions and as if suspended in a space made all the more profound by the procession of slices of colour and the contrasts between dark and light areas.