ROME - Landscapes, still lifes, portraits, indoor and outdoor figures, circus and vaudeville characters: the reading of the world that Antonio Donghi entrusted to his canvases has developed on these themes.
The entire artistic career of one of the most prominent interpreters of Magical Realism in Italy delves into the exhibition La Magia del Silenzio in Rome which Palazzo Merulana hosts from 9 February to 26 May.
Fabio Benzi, the curator, has selected 34 works - with masterpieces never exhibited before - from the nuclei of the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna di Roma, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Banca d'Italia, UniCredit Art Collection and from the Elena Foundation itself and Claudio Cerasi, which owns the exhibition space, to document the activity of the Roman painter, his secluded and silent research, the imagination suspended between the abstract and the realist sphere on which the attention of critics has focused only starting from the Eighties after a silence of decades.
Antonio Donghi, born in Rome in 1897, belongs - observes the curator - to the generation just too young to have experienced and shared the modernist demands of the Roman Secessions as well as the first phase of Futurism, which places its maturity in the very early post-war years : that is, in contact with the demands of the 'return to order'.
Benzi, a profound connoisseur of the painting of the second half of the 19th century and the 20th century, questions the reasons for the artist's sudden transition, between the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923, from a style based on traditional matrix painting nineteenth-century to a completely renewed vision, capable of fitting into and impacting the European avant-garde.
The artist - he underlines - "captures the formal root of ancient art and at the same time the less courtly expression of national custom; he becomes the melancholic poet of a humanity that seems to be at a crossroads. The slow Roman tradition or the modernity of new times?".
In this clash of new bourgeois identities, of a changing world "the characters really seem to question themselves about their identities, as in a comedy by Pirandello or Bontempelli, figures uncertain of themselves and their role in the world, characters poised between fascism oppressive and relaxed everyday life".
The homage to Donghi is an opportunity to add not only a study, still missing, on his eclectic cultural sources aimed at reviving the internal rhythms of classical Italian painting in new forms, but also a reflection on the important role that some collections Roman public institutions have played a role in the knowledge and diffusion of his art.
The story returns the image of a painter "clearly Roman in his nature and in the culture of the time, as also emerges from the stupendous landscapes of the city and its surroundings, in which the artist seems to want to extract the atmospheric component to make them live by an immobile and eternal life".
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA