Ombre estive

A cluster of trees occupies the entire space of the cardboard, crowding it, infusing it with anxiety: as if to signify that even before this placid view of a town, Pirandello is unable to assuage his tormented vision of reality. Rather than a slow and peaceful play of shadows over a clearing (as the title of the work suggests), instead we have a labyrinthine ravine, an accrual of diverse greens, written and deleted throughout by a recurring sign that invades the surface, almost fully obscuring the horizon line way up in the sky beyond.
It is likely that the work was presented at the major solo exhibition of nineteen paintings, almost all recent, dedicated to Pirandello by the 1956 Venice Biennale. The show’s catalogue includes a painting that cannot be identified with certainty but bears the same title and the date 1955. What is certain is that it is among those executed between 1954 and 1958 and reflects what at the time was Pirandello’s full adhesion to the abstract-concrete style – especially its basic premise. This entailed the apprehension of reality through its transformation using formal neo-cubist and abstract stylistic elements, made popular in those years by Lionello Venturi: to whom Pirandello was particularly close during that period.