The idea of Realism

 

The idea of Realism
   
 
And it is perhaps here that his idea of realism, that is to be the dominant theme of all his painting, takes form. The only one to hit the centre with happy intuition and unusual clarity was young Bruno Rosada, in an article on the occasion of a one–man show. And Lucatello would remember him with admiration and respect for the rest of his life.
Because his friends among critics are really few. He realised when the dialogue stopped at the epidermic level of the picture, at the often trickful game of forced comparisons, at the wanting at all costs to find a direction, a group, a comfortable “ism” in which to flatten him. Then he became rigid, argumentative and to the bewildered critic repeated his stubborn, misunderstood intolerance to bear tradition and history. What did signify for him emerging from tradition, contesting the same arguments of history? It meant looking for a new language, which brought back the dialogue between man and nature “to the inside” and therefore “outside” the (historic) system which produced alienation and destruction. Thus, for him painter, it meant “looking” at reality in a different way, making realist pictures that broke classical perspective and proposed a new one: concentrating on a detail and allowing it to spread without preconditioned limits.
Proposing an alternative way of considering nature, of considering man, of thinking of oneself.
And he always showed diffidence towards that so often gratuitous avantgarde art, lacking in interior structure: everyone has his geographical and environmental roots, like a plant, like an animal, and it goes against nature to ignore them. A cosmopolitan painter, he said, is just a travelling salesman.
 
 
 
 

 

 


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