Old presses

Savelli Turcato
L'Universo, November 19th 1949

19 November 1949

We do not believe that Savelli expects from us conventional praise. We were the first to write an essay on him ("Raccolta", 1941), where, as in later instances, we were not sparing in our praise. Savelli had a talent for humanizing and normalizing dandy and fauve inspirations, a naivety in that fever of fiery colours, a modesty in the distribution of paint on the canvas, forming layers similar to our last "atmospheric" and "tonal" tradition, though distant from Mafai's patterns.

Take two pictures from the exhibition that has opened recently at the "Art Club": Flowers (# 6) and The Mother (# 1). Their red lakes ring out, but dimly, in the thickening of the impasto; and reality is not transformed, but, pushed to the bottom, showing through visually at last, for example in the half-closed eyelids, the animated face of "The Mother". We wonder why all his pictures with a "sacred" theme live the fleeting life of decorative art, when they live at all. Why is the painter less dramatic, less "sacred", the more his matter gets animated? The reason is only one, we think: his inability to plunge headlong into life, maybe into sin and vice, to expiate the weight of flesh through a true melancholy. Savelli appears as a sinner who has not tasted yet the bitter fruit, his desperation – remember the naked and dishevelled women of many of his paintings, with arms lifted above the head in a gesture of shame – is a mental desperation. More convincing, in this unhappy moment for Savelli, are his landscapes (see "Ponte Margherita"). Here "nature" is benevolent to Savelli's tormented soul: he looks at it like a boy suddenly captured by colours, light, air, after a night spent in the anguish of imagined sins; he finds himself inside these hallucinated horizons, in those houses haphazardly thrown beyond the bridge like a Carnival Sunday, almost an echo of those shaken senses, those alluring visions, after the murkiness of the night.

Turcato has a talent for coordinating, in a limpid and balanced structure of colour and light, the manners of anti-tonal painting (Birolli, Guttuso) with a scholastic diligence.

The three landscapes displayed recall Guttuso openly, it is true, but Turcato takes from Guttuso the most tender and brilliant Picasso, almost a supply of balance, for his future idylls. In fact, Turcato's nature is not violent, orgiastic. He knows how to open to reality only by enchanting himself: but not like Mafai, rather in his own manner. See for example "Night Construction Site": the picture is a construction site too, truncated as it is; but his way of building shapes is intelligent and aware, in those brush strokes freely pasted with light, wide, striped with gold and green, abstract but not inert - as they often are for Biroli, who from rhythm descends into a game. Truly, looking repeatedly at the painting creates an elegy in the squalid abandon of night, all the more appreciated and intriguing for the clear scorn, visible everywhere, for picturesque. In this, Turcato has something to teach also to his fellow exhibiting painter.

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