Banlieu di Parigi

An anonymous corner in an otherwise splendid Paris; a closed gate marks the entrance to a tumbledown house (à vendre, says the affixed sign); a modest courtyard in which stands a black tree, whose bare branches reach for a leaden sky. De Pisis, more frequently accustomed to portraying the more fascinating and historical monuments and views of Paris as well as of London (where he spent considerable periods in 1933 and 1935), chose to pause here, before this desolate view of the city outskirts.
The result, like the Ritratto di Vecchio painted in Cortina a few years earlier (also in the Bank’s collection), is a fascinating and rather unusual image in De Pisis’s journey at the time: a dark, pensive painting, like a whispered confession. The painting, composed of browns, greys and blacks, accompanies this intense sentiment tinged with melancholia. For one brief moment De Pisis abandons the rapid-fire brushstrokes of his punctuation technique (the “pictorial stenography”, to use the term coined by Cesare Brandi in 1932), which by then was one of his hallmarks, and instead drags the brush, almost devoid of paint, which accordingly appears to accompany the painter in his quest for a void, a silence, an absence.