La cantoniera nuova

The “new roadman’s house” is a pink building with a windowless side wall and the façade under the light. Trees wall in that part of the building with their dense foliage, beneath a sky in which multi-coloured clouds vie for space with blue.
Dating from 1929, the work is from the central, most significant period of Oppi’s career. His particular interpretation of the Novecento figurative school is evident. His way of conducting the “return to order” certainly features attention to the lessons of the Primitives, i.e. non-classical and pre-Renaissance art. At the same time, though, his Mitteleuropean experiences imbued his work with a heavy trace of Böcklin’s symbolism. This trace, it must be said, was wedded to another, that of De Chirico’s Metaphysical art, which in Oppi, as in other Italian and foreign artists, took the form of a new articulation of figurative painting.