“Cominetti manages to summarize what the war of '14-'18 actually was, beyond any rhetoric,” says Zorzato (Vice President and Councilor for Culture of the Veneto Region). "In his epic moments, but also and above all in the terrible suffering that united those who in this land were inside the trenches of the front and those who, hunched over like some of Van Gogh's potato growers, were displaced from here, refugees in search of distant asylum from the fiery crater of death of our mountains”. 85 years have passed since the last major exhibition of Cominetti's war drawings, which at the time was welcomed by the foyer of the Quirino Theater in Rome. The artist, who would disappear the following year, could not be present.
For the occasion, Marinetti delivered what the chronicles reported by "L'Impero" handed down as "a fervent speech". The Academic of Italy highlighted the achievement of "the heights of the epic in the rigorous and expressive synthesis of the stroke, in the representative vigor of the composition, in the heroic sense of the titanic rhythms and in the profound truth of the ambient atmosphere".
Adding notes of bombastic rhetoric, daughters of Marinetti's praise of war as "the only hygiene of peoples martyred by pacifism".
All this has settled today. And the exhibition in Villa Contarini, with the rough power of the sign, returns an artist of remarkable stature and a documentary filmmaker of great effectiveness.
It is no coincidence that some of these drawings were intended to tell the readers of French illustrated magazines about the war, right from the beginning in 14 in the Ardennes.
On the front, first French then – as a volunteer – on the Italian one, Cominetti was a soldier alongside all the other soldiers, he lived in those trenches and under the Austro-Hungarian fire on Grappa, documenting as an artist what he saw and above all lived.
In the drawings, of very different sizes, numerous and very large, he synthesizes the infinite realities that he and the others experience every day: the hand-to-hand combat of infantrymen, the piles of dead, the sorties of the cavalry, the crashes of airplanes, the explosions of the grenades, the moments of rest, better of abandonment, in the trenches and in the shelters. But also the exodus of Venetian refugees under their loads of household goods, the dilapidation of the houses, the oxen abandoned in the furrows under the shells. In short, the terrible and true face of war, rendered with the essence of black and white of a simple pencil and "with the light of the soul, of the craftsman capable of risking, in the magical flash of magnesium of revealed aesthetic truth, the hearts of comrades veterans” (“il Lavoro” of 30 June 1929).
Those of Cominetti are certainly unmatched documentary pages, which as such have entered museums and documentation centers throughout Europe. But they are also and above all superb works of art, by an artist who found an autonomous path between divisionism and futurism and new avant-gardes, demonstrating excellence as a painter, draftsman, set designer, costume designer and even designer between Italy and Paris. Before being undone, he who had passed years of the front line, by a trivial motorcycle accident.
The exhibition, curated by Beatrice Buscaroli Fabbri, was commissioned by the Vice President and Councilor for Culture of the Veneto Region, Honorable Marino Zorzato, as part of the Veneto regional initiatives for the centenary of the conflict, with the patronage of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers , Mission Structure for Anniversaries of National Interest.
