Oggetti elettrici

Small, indeterminate “electrical objects” are piled together on a table pitched extremely high at the centre of the composition; alongside it is a blue folder and a glass. Nothing else. As usual, Pirandello’s still lifes are built using very little, almost as though his meagre visual pretexts have been placed on the horizontal plane by a casual sweep of the broom; governed by a tonal blend of a few earth colours in the midst of which a note of blue frequently rings out.
The painting is one of a small series of replicas of still lifes completed in Paris in 1928 and 1929. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the artist began to work on them, but it was some time in the early 1950s. Pirandello had lost all but photographic traces of those still lifes, which were accordingly no longer available for exhibition, but he nonetheless desired to illustrate the origin of his remote, dazzling beginnings, developed alongside Cézanne’s proto-cubism and the painting of Braque. This was all the more true seeing that Venturi’s poetics of the abstract-concrete had now made the works so relevant. Oggetti elettrici, which therefore literally reproduces a painting of the same title from his Paris days, was exhibited at the retrospective devoted to his work by the 1966 Fiorino di Firenze prize and there correctly labelled “more recent replica”. But it was later frequently reproduced and exhibited with the erroneous date of 1928.