The Artwork of the month - April 2021

A line of red flags is floating among the crowd; their pointed shapes, with their upward pointing tips, contrast with the white stripes of the banners and the beige-brown lines of varying thickness and movement, suggesting the swarming of thousands of demonstrators, an undistinguished mass of individuals that translates into a dense graphic texture, a continuum of signs that unifies the entire pictorial space in a tight rhythm.

Giulio Turcato's Comizio is an extraordinary example of the neo-Cubist style of abstractionism that the artist developed in the mid-twentieth century, convinced that there was a valid alternative to the language of the socialist style of realism to describe a historical period - the post-World War II period - characterised by political commitment and strong social tensions.

There are several versions of this subject - also entitled Flags, People's Day, May Day or simply Composition - in various versions and of different dimensions, both earlier and later.

In the Comizi as in other politically themed series (the ruins, the factories, the riots, the mines), Turcato represents subjects dearest to the socialist and communist culture, at the same time exercising his commitment also on the side of formal renewal: from the years of his militancy in the Art Club, Forma 1 and the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, the artist was convinced that Italian painting should join the European and American strand of formalist research; not an easy option, given Togliatti's violent polemic against abstract art.

The painting seems to derive from an autobiographical memory, specifically from the vision of a demonstration gathered in Piazza del Colosseo, seen from the heights of Colle Oppio. This explains the particular point of view that excludes the horizon and sees the complete saturation of pictorial space in a two-dimensionality without perspective, tending instead to resolve the narration of a fact of contemporary history in the universal poetry of pure geometric and symbolic forms.

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