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It lasts less than one year: the project of
a huge studio has only just been completed when in May ’76 the
earthquake eruptes. The studio falls apart even if the paintings are
mainly saved. The house is fractured, the family lives in a tent,
spends a winter as refugees in Grado. And there is the fear, a terrifying
fear which wound like a snake around the body and the mind. In the
general climate of disaster, once again Lucatello feels defrauded.
In the autumn of the same year the Palazzo delle Prigioni, in Venice,
summarizes with a one–man show, organized by the Ravagnan Gallery,
the experience now concluded in the studio in Vendoglio.
For many months he practically cannot work. He goes to a little boarding
house in Grado where some devastated old women were, and he draws
them, catching their features which are both severe and resigned.
“That’s my grandmother” the locals say, quite convinced,
when they look at them.
Then they live for a long time in a hut in Tarcento. A friend offers
him again a chance to work in a little flat in Brazzacco, and he reacts
and finds his bold strength again. After the trauma of the earthquake
life pushes him inside and once again he finds the fascination of
erotic adventure: in the paintings which follows, nature and sex are
confused in one exalting abandon.
He reaffirms the joy of living with a painting made more precious
by the delicate contrasts, happy in the smiling poetry of the bunches
of flowers, in the dark blotches of woods flooded by light, and further
still in the round red suns, suspended in the white of dawn.
Another friend gives him a studio in Treppo Grande, where he has a
little more pace, but not enough for the big pictures he feels the
need to paint. So he lays out the canvas on the ground and manages
to paint it all, with the energy accumulated in his big strong artist’s
hands. |
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