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The Soccer Players |
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Color, a color that is deliberately
antinaturalistic, at this point in Sassu’s painting becomes a specific form of the
modern: a color which seemed not to know half-measures, the color of the red men in all their different versions. This
was, in the last analysis, nothing more than the constant, almost programmatic,
application of a choice made in the years of Futurism, and it was a choice for modernity, which conformist contemporary
criticism commonly perceived in terms of a debatable excess, also because it was in open
contrast with the palette of the Novecento Italiano. |
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Dioscuri |
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In the works of the early
Thirties myth began to overlay
reality: on one hand, Sassu was always attentive to and attracted by contemporaneity, by
daily life as well as by the events of politics and history lived first hand; but on the
other he was passionately open to the imagination, thus extremely receptive to myth, both
for its aspects of narrative extraordinariness, and for its underlying values, which he
felt to be absolute, essentially outside of history. |
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Red Men |
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This helps to explain the
interchangeability in his painting, for example, of the sports champion and the Argonaut.
Whether called red men, Dioscuri or Argonauts, cyclists, soccer players or horsemen,
whether they are boys on a beach, falconing, or passing on the street, his figures in
those years in any case stand on the borderline between myth and reality, in constant
oscillation between a meta-historic condition (nude men in a nature barely evoked by
minimal landscape elements) and a precise definition also in social terms (passersby in a
modern city, men and women in cafés). Stylistically
they reveal affinities with experiments, somewhere between sculpture and bas relief, being
made in that same period in "poor" materials by Giandante X and Fontana (coal and
conglomerates the former, incised cement the latter), |
