Officina di notte

Indistinguishable machines saturate the composition’s surface, governed by the sullen reverberations of frames and barriers that create the image’s surface rhythm, with its imperfectly traced geometrical structure. This is what memory – instrument of regression to an awareness of the reality of these years when the artist was surrounded by many companions – restores from the figurative pretext in which the painting arose: an inactive workshop at night.
After Togliatti’s anathema the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, in which the painter and his Venetian friends Vedova, Pizzinato and Viani had participated, was dissolved. Work began on the establishment of the new Group of Eight, which Santomaso also joined. Closely resembling Birolli and Corpora’s work, his paintings were steeped in impressions from Paris – the lessons of Neo-Cubism, for example, to which he soon added that of Hans Hartung and his wandering signs on the painting surface (something we first catch a glimpse of here). Although in Hartung the genesis of that sign was more definitely abstract than that of Santomaso, who remained stubbornly connected to an emotion experienced before nature.