Trama di nudo

A female figure – a frontal nude, her hands resting on her lap – occupies the entire space of the painting. Indeed, it almost seems as though the mount, the cardboard that was Pirandello’s material of choice in the post-war years, is insufficient to contain the entire image of that pitiful figure: both above and below, the face and legs appear to have been cruelly truncated. The paint, applied and removed a hundred times by the palette knife, is saturated, yet it does not thicken into the proud embellishments seen in so much of late Italian Informalist art. The colours, restricted to a varying range of ochres and greens, appear to emphasize the warm atmosphere that surrounds her.
The painting was presented at the 1956 Biennale, at which the artist – by then nearly sixty – had a large room devoted entirely to his work, introduced in the catalogue by Nello Ponente. Poised between an intense emotional dimension and an opposing tension towards the naturalistic rhythm of the light, the image is perfectly in harmony with the abstract-concrete poetics inaugurated by Lionello Venturi and defended by him in those years of the “Group of Eight”. Perhaps it was simply his age that kept him out of the Group, or perhaps his lifelong pursuit of seclusion, which had also kept him at some remove, prior to the war, from the lingua franca of the Roman School.