Ritratto di Lina

The work shows the face of a woman, in a three-quarters pose looking to the right-hand side of the picture. The woman is wearing a sort of loose jacket, the tones of which contrast with those of the face, rosy and soft, delicately infused by a light that colours the cheeks.
The picture was painted in 1930, when Mafai was well on the way to making his own original expressive choices. The particular tonalism that in Italy found its highest expression in Giorgio Morandi was taken over by Mafai, but is inflected over chromatic ranges far from any tendency towards being monochrome. The tonal aspect attenuates the reds, which, however, in becoming rosy do not lose any of their lighting and transpire below every other tonality.
In Mafai’s painting things, in this case a face, always provide a concrete physical consistency and at the same time appear to be subjected, in the flow of their existence, to a sort of slow but fatal erosion. In short, in this work there appears to be full expression of the theme of a wound that is hidden, not declared but underlying the experience of life that characterizes Mafai’s art.