Tempesta sulla valle dell’Aniene

In his 1925 canvas depicting a storm on the Valley of the Aniene, Ferrazzi contrasts the quiet hamlet spread out below with a landscape which, invested by the bursting sky, fully reveals the artists dramatic vocation.
The painting is constructed on a vertical line that from the valley floor, still lit by the sun, rises towards the discontinuities of form and colour of a stormy sky, amidst lowering clouds and blinding flashes.
In a canvas of no great size Ferrazzi nonetheless renders high testimony to an Expressionism that is altogether unlike the German school, an Expressionism not founded on deforming the objects depicted and on the clash between strident colours. In this original version of Expressionism, the element of drama comes from a compositional structure that sets chromatic masses of different tonality in violent contrast.
In the context of the Italian Novecento, a work like one this seems to reject optimistic recourse to the great historical models invoked by “returns to order”, bearing witness instead to an uneasiness and an idea of crisis that underscore its proximity to many contemporary European experiences.