I first saw a painting by Albino Lucatello in 1947: he held it in his hands, stilI wet, while an exuberant Venetian countess, very democratic, talked to me about him.
The painting showed a swimming–pool on the Zattere, a worn out theme, rendered childish after so many efforts which have foundered in naturalistic magnetism. The qualities I discovered in the picture introduced me to a young man with a way of his own of seeing colour and form.
The vibrations of the pIace were there, yet hidden; the inertia of the perspective frame–work, broken by the marked presence of provocatively independent blue lines, decisively enclosed the essentials of this image, at the same time recalling other intentions.
This, in nuce, presented Lucatello’s first problem. He was to give it many different solutions from then to 1956 with his Roofs in Venice, shown at the XXVIII Biennale.
Being naturally immersed in the historical–natural lagoon environment, his inclination to see through the colour light, made him grasp the values emerging from the reality in which his experience was born, and obscured all other research, holding back other perceptions.
Yet at the very moment of this choice, like an act of criticism, he was moved by his will to break this moment of ecstasy, even if it seemed to hold him like a spell, a happiness, yet incomplete and lagging if measured against the feeling of history, never before as then present in the contradictory complexity it awoke in him, the awareness of which was projected in his plastic vision.
This explains his use of an emphasis of signs that placed his stilI lyrical and released feeling so near to thought. In these paintings there is a sort of running after each other of immediacy and mediation, there is a clash, a recapturing; there is a disgust for the qualities of his beginnings, the premises of a forthcoming view of gloom.
One can explain his acceptance of the elaborate neorealistic definition only by interpreting it as an artistic act, as an act in itself complete and rich in relationship.
But if we set aside the dynamic vision of this act, taking away little by little his conquered linguistic indipendence, always characterized in investigation, disassociating the social implications from science, what there was of legitimate at the beginning of this artistic movement is impoverished; by projecting individual ethics into collective ethics, it also weakens the spirit that should animate the difficult didactic operation carried out through art. But in this phase Lucatello displayed a torrent of energy to express the duty he felt to denounce the closed proletarian condition.
It was shown by the artist in the image of a degraded workman, a dock worker. He did not show attitudes taken from life (he continued to choose a known repertory that has its roots in the XIX century), but the ungracious tumult, the weight of the materiaI that were meant to express a hard condition of things in which this class is circumscribed and envisaged by those who govern.
An anguished state of things, anguished because discovered in the human being, that restricted his rambling horizon. Compact black swift lines bore into the faces and the bodies, communicate spite, attention, anger, even more than the content of the image.
This image, little by little, though present, remained outside the event of the birth of a new consciousness within the accepted neorealistic poetics. Lucatello's plastic materialism was born very near to other pressing poetics, but set apart from them and perhaps even opposing them.
The objective reference to the image either remained present as a conventional gesture, increasingly disassociated from the place of the conflict in his renewed feeling, which was of itself the formation of the image, or was often carried away by the violence of a new rising structure.
What did these thick bituminous layers of paint, outlining a neck of land in the sea against the light, slapped on to the horizon by a white and yellow pitiless sky, incredibly stretched out, signify?
Landscapes, 1967, 1968, that at times suffer from the intervention of abstraction, but only to sink even more in that approach an organic primordial state. Lucatello, maintaining his ties with reality through the elementary certainty that senses instil, with action that he acquires by degrees, prepares himself for the reception of matter. And there again matter becomes an instrument, beloved, ductile, but a servant with a function.
Reality is investigated for its immediate use; it is not, let us say, transfigured. On the contrary, if there is a limitation to this period, it appears in the quantitative dosing which is instinctively calcuiated in relation to the object perceived.
This balance between subject, nature and medium is not what Lucatello wants, whilst the prevarications of the medium on the other two factors, a certain clash between them, in the course of the relationship necessitated by an expressive synthesis, are intentionalIy sought after by the artist, in a latent state of consciousness. It is this break that wiIl make him proceed.
When matter heaves like an immense wave, enclosing in itself essence, gesture, dimension, then Lucatello will have turned the previous relationship upside down. But he must first burn other fires, compete with Rimbaud and Courbet – like avidity for nature (…Mangeons l’air, – Le roc, Ies charbons, le fer… – Mangez – Les cailloux qu’un pauvre brise, – les vieilles pierres d’églises, – Les galets, fils des déluges, – Pains couchés aux vallées grises! – Mes faims, c’est les bouts d’air noir; L’azur sonneur; – C’est l’éstomac qui me tire...). That child–like joy comes back, whose perceptions are keen, mixed with the self–possessivenes of the adult.
Looking at his paintings of 1962 you do not know if Lucatello is raising a cry of defiance or a hymn of exaltation. A vortical ecstasy quivers in those landscapes of Tarcento, where he now lives, and which he questions with soft abandonment. Is it the sweetness of an adieu he will soon be giving to the mimetic measure? Because after the dark period there is that of a liberation born of a new environment, where every shade of green is beloved, where thick strokes and wide spaces coexist and are identified in woods and open spaces, placed in relation to each other with a knowledge that shows the hand of a master.
But here again he goes back to the problem: he wants matter itself to be emotional and organic. Everything falls, outside this, into scenic illusion; everything rolls in the breaking up of pieces of detail. Indeed one is reminded of the monochromes of Fontana and Yves Klein, but the fact of being still nature, and the feeling of completeness, are the characters that belong only to Lucatello’s monochromes.
Now matter does not only support the naturalistic deception, but Is in itself nature. If Lucatello were not supplied with a concrete force of imagination one might fear that he is pointing towards an abstraction without an opening, that he contradicts himself, inviting us to an Elysium of essentials, still a prisoner of other poetics of values. But his theoretical rigour is joined to a sensible animation, and in his monochromes he expresses alI the force, the conditions of mind, that matter contains, to which man will give from time to time a name, animating, even if arbitrarily, an indifference that seems contradictory, but which is only the life of an element in its mysterious evolution.

Translated by Giselda Lucatello