Forty years after his death, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, dedicates an important exhibition Emanuele Cavalli and the Roman School: through the archives, edited by Manuel Carrera.
The exhibition – open from 10 February to 20 March 2022 – documents a crucial period in the history of 1904th century art, that of Italy between the two wars, through the gaze of one of its protagonists: Emanuele Cavalli (Lucera 1981 – Florence XNUMX ).
The recent donation of his archive to the National Gallery by his daughter Maria Letizia allows us to deepen our gaze on the complex artistic and human universe of the great artist, studded with intertwining with some of the most influential personalities of his time. Diaries, letters and documents tell of the partnership with Felice Carena of which he was a pupil and who introduced him on the path of tonal painting to which Cavalli mixed suggestions that derived from Virgilio Guidi and Armando Spadini, as well as from Ferruccio Ferrazzi. From the unpublished material exhibited in the exhibition, the relationships he maintained with Fausto Pirandello, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Corrado Cagli, Roberto Melli are even better configured: the protagonists, that is, of the so-called "Roman School", a definition coined by the critic Waldemar-George in the presentation of a exhibition held in Paris in 1933 by Cavalli, Cagli, Capogrossi and Ezio Sclavi.
A consolidated partnership from 1927 to 1930 when the artist took part in some exhibitions together with the painters Giuseppe Capogrossi and Francesco Di Cocco, also going to France (1928), where he was introduced by his friend Onofrio Martinelli into the environment of the Italiens de Paris (De Pisis, De Chirico, Savinio and others) and where, later, he participates in the exhibition at the Salon Bovy in Paris together with Fausto Pirandello and Di Cocco.
From there the adventure of the formation of the so-called Roman School began.
Typical of Cavalli will be the search for correspondences between shapes and colours, objects and subjects, and the artist's desire to identify connections between the tones of painting and those of music should be read precisely in this perspective. The pinnacle of this research is made up of the series of nine paintings – which is partially reconstructed in this exhibition – presented at the Roman Quadrennial of 1943: the challenge that Cavalli addressed to himself was that of being able to harmonize the tonal values, in an openly musical, with the concrete representation of the human figure. The limitation of the portrait therefore forced him to match the chromatic variations to the tones of the flesh, that is the only color that unites all the works in the series. However, it would be inaccurate to consider the works in the series of color harmonies mere exercises in aesthetic research. In fact, the psychological component is not secondary in the paintings: with each variation of tone Cavalli effectively suggests a sensation or a state of mind, thus demonstrating a fine introspective capacity.
“I painted this series of paintings in different shades – he wrote on the occasion of an exhibition in Rome – working hard to combine my contrapuntal sensitivity for color with a certain innate Italian sense of reality. I choose the human figure because it lends itself less to transpositions and obvious abstractions than still lifes and landscapes. While I can't convince myself that intelligence and intellect are outside of man. I believe in a subtler reality manifested in art, often in contrast with contingent and false reality. What is the secret language of the expressive nodes is not possible for me to grasp. Are colour, shape and geometry the words and phrases of this language? Or the language itself? My attitude does not want to be decidedly humanistic and to solve the theory of aesthetic problems with another competence. I would like to recall the monumental collection of preludes and fugues in major and minor keys - the Well-Tempered Clavier - created for well-known explanatory purposes and may I be allowed today in another field, given the due proportions and reductions, a brief attempt with the colors and the human figure"
On display, in addition to a selection of the most significant documents from Emanuele Cavalli's archive, are some of the paintings, whose diaries and notes recount the long creative gestation of what has been defined as his "magical realism". The evolution of Cavalli's painting is then marked in the exhibition through comparison with masterpieces by his closest colleagues, from private collections and from the collections of the National Gallery.
The meaning of painting as a search for harmony was specified by Cavalli on the occasion of the II Quadrennial. Presenting his one-man show in the catalogue, he writes: “I try to objectify with the utmost clarity what I feel about life by deciphering it in its universal value, that is, stripped, as far as possible, of all contingencies. Research in this "human" sense distances me from abstract or aestheticizing painting. However, I am of the opinion that the various meanings (even the literary ones), should all be present in a complete work, generated by Constructive needs: this is why the story becomes a pretext. It is the plastic that gives shape to the myth: the interest in the story ceases over time even before the surface qualities of the painting”.
Even more than this declaration some testimonies help to understand the artist such as that of Melli (1933) who describes his "ascetic expression ... fruit of the grafting of conceptual abstraction, into which fantasy has been transformed, on realistic substance", and that of Lucchese on his working method: "Emanuele had, physically and morally, something that reminded Thomas Aquinas and Angelico, his quiet speech was imbued with a wisdom that came from far away (from the Pythagorean School - for thought – and from the Pompeian civilization – for painting and its secrets). My poses, at his studio, were supported by invigorating cups of tea and, above all, by listening to Giovanni Sebastiano Bach's Toccatas and Fugues. This exceptional accompaniment, repeated daily and for hours, seemed to instill in the painter the gift of tone. there his work became concentrated, absorbed. The environment took on an almost liturgical, Gregorian atmosphere…”.
The final section of the exhibition intends to offer a glimpse of Emanuele Cavalli's activity as a photographer, investigating the connections with the research he conducted in painting. Portraits, landscapes and still lifes outline the profile of a photographer with full mastery of the tool and a surprisingly modern gaze, such as to arouse renewed interest from critics in recent times.
National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art
Avenue of Fine Arts 131
OPENING HOURS: from Tuesday to Sunday from 9 to 19. Last admission 45 minutes before closing
