During a one–man show at Bevilacqua Americans arrive: a gallery in Los Angeles signs a contract with him. For a brief period it seems as if commercial success pours down on him: they organise exhibitions, they sell his paintings at high prices to big people in legendary California. Then suddenly silence. Apparently the rumour of his communism has reached them, right in the middle of Macarthyism. And he lost even about forty of his very best paintings.

With that little economic euphoria he takes a new studio in San Vio and rents a house in San Pietro in Volta for one summer, in ’57, to take his children to.
But he doesn’t paint the sea. A series of “vegetable gardens in Portosecco” emerges, lumpy and materic lines of dark vegetables, under white or yellow skies: the object can only just be glimpsed, but the precise reference to nature cannot be missed. Nature in which there is the peasant who is unseen, but who is omnipresent in the humus of that salty earth. And they are followed by the black material lands, where the lumps of colour even stick out, with flaming skies at sunset – but also teapots, these unexpected still–lifes that cut into matter and, further still, make the mixture of nature and man credible. But as the sense of his work becomes clearer in his mind, almost as a natural contrast, his uneasiness and intolerance to bear the Venetian artistic circles becomes more and more acute. Extremely gentle in human relationships, tolerant and generous towards the suffering and weakness of feelings, he becomes bitter and rigorous when painting is involved, because for him painting means cleaning, it is the moral of truth as far as this can be contingent. Thus the enthusiastic Lucatello of the early years becomes chronically angry. At exhibitions he argues with the organizers who want agreement, with the critics who in the juries discard authentic effort and are indulgent towards the anonymous throng of beggars. Lucatello becomes an embarassment. He is always somebody who has “worked well” three years before. Or perhaps he is good but “went his own sweet way”. With him there is no chance of dialogue, he is a bit mad, an isolated. And he in fact isolate himself. Venice becomes a hated love. He wants to leave, but not just to have supporters in other art capitals and cliques: his is the choice of an exile.