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"You have to
dirty your hands to make your mind clean – but in painting there’s
everything".
He said so when he was twenty and continued to believe it for the
rest of his life. |
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It was a priest from his parish, “I Frari”,
who noticed that that child, who in other ways was very lively, would
frequently stand for long moments completely absorbed in front of
the huge paintings which seemed even bigger in the half light of the
Basilica. The priest handed him his first books with reproductions,
and from then on Lucatello began “to think through painting”.
Literally. The sign on paper, the colour on canvas, for him were the
culture of sublimation: through painting spouts out the history of
man, his primitive anxiety, the joyful shiver of feeling alive.
In the numbed atmosphere of the Art Institute, when the war was still
on and there was a smell of mould in the stagnation of autarkic culture
, he developed the dogged mistrust, the disorderly rebellion –
that would become his way of being – towards everything that
was predetermined: only in continuous rebirth, however difficult and
painful it may be for the mind, is there the hope of change.
His talents as a painter were not debated. On the contrary. But teachers
didn’t accept his obstinate autonomy in formal research, his
vehement disobedience of method in a school directed towards the “craft”.
At the diploma they told him “go to the Academy” and failed
him with virtuous determination. |
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