With the typical diffidence that many artists cultivate, and not without reason, towards criticism and its classifying apparatus, Albino Lucatello would probably find arbitrary the process of rereading his painting in the light of structural lines and language borrowed from the international context or converging in them. But I think it is quite inevitable, on an occasion such as this, offered to us by the sensitivity of the people responsible for the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Udine, to attempt the analysis “in situation” of an event of art amongst the most important, and at the same time most discrete, of those that have taken place in Italy after the second World War. The verification of this assertion would not, what is more, be possible if one did not refer constantly and concretely to a reality which, like all cultural realities, cannot be defined in geographical terms, neither can it be understood within the limits of affective choices, which are always understandable in an artist who wants to be free to choose relationships and certain places for his work; but this is fairly irrelevant for a person who must, like a critic or a historian of art, move according to the widest possible perspectives, or risk being accused of partiality in his judgement, and of reducing the field of inquiry to conciliating interpretative conventions. These may be a burden when the personality of an artist such as Lucatello is involved, certainly capable of suggestiveness also because of a sort of sincere tendency to isolate himself from the places of greatest rhetorical noise, and on account of that vocation for solitude and silent reflection which led him, as can be read in the writing about him, to be suspicious of tradition and of history, or rather to find new dialectic significance in reliving the first as the tradition of places, sensations and affections, and the second more as the memories of polluted humanities than as a process open to the present.
The aversion to systems is a very common thing among artists who operate through impulses and intuition, and who believe in reason (the source of every historicism) only in as far as, in the sense of Pascal, it can affirm its unreasonableness for becoming the instrument of criticism against homologation for systems of life and art. From the little that I have grasped from those who knew Lucatello better than me, I think I can say that he was not a man to escape from anxieties and problems, even when more serenely he seemed to abandon himself to the enchantment of a “purely” pictorial vision, or to the confidences of friendship, which constituted undoubted points of reference for his working and his living en artiste.
His passion for politics, which must have remained strong even in the moments of greatest disappointment and most acute bitterness, and the consequent declarations of poetics always based on principles of a realism which had little to do with that of the dogmatic print of Zdanov strict supporters, show us his will to participate in social questions which never weakened, not even when he lost his reasons for being politically engaged and Lucatello felt, like other Italian artists and intellectuals, that the moment had come for art and culture to safeguard above all their own autonomy towards the different power centres, from the academic one to precisely the political one, which was starting to play the never–ending game of compromises suggested by functionalism and pragmatism.
Lucatello had probably belived, in the years of generous illusions after the war, that aesthetic function and social function could converge, if not become identical, in an action of direct political intent, without the specific values of art having to suffer for it, in the conviction furthermore that they would be exalted by it. It was a moment of truth and of illusion of left-wing culture that had one of its most disquieting and lively centres exactly in Venice. The events that led to the constitution and dissolution of the “Fronte Nuovo delle Arti”, the hardening of the debate around positions that were dogmatically contrasting with realism and formalism, the crisis that went through and divided left-wing culture in our country, were things that Lucatello suffered and lived with the passion that his wife Giselda has testified to in a text that I consider fundamental. To keep as a reference the world of workers, porters, miners, rice-field women, of that humanity that for the damnation of labour and the pride of living seemed closer to what intellectuals, who were tired of metaphysics and rhetorical redundancy believed was “nature”, was nothing more than a way to give breathing-space in art to that which in literature, with Vittorini and Pavese, and in the cinema with popular epics of neorealism, had been revealed as the true European intuition of the new Italian culture. The symbiosis between man and nature, the vital and vibrating sense of matter, the pathos of being and fully living a reality that could be exalting or anguished, but certainly ineluctable, were the common elements of all Italian culture at the end of the nineteen–fifties. If one looks closely, one sees that both neo–realists, abstract–concretists and also the last naturalists who made up a wide front within informal culture, all took their inspiration from the same principle of reality. There was nothing surprising in the fact that Lucatello could find no less important reasons for being involved in testing himself with the matter understood as the organic image of the “natural”, and with the faces and “figures” of a humanity that just like nature seemed to show the signs of the insults and attacks of millenniums, but which still lived and witnessed to a possible authenticity of living. It’s not up to me on this occasion to examine the works composed by Lucatello in those years of fervid effort, given that the present exhibition starts from the first works of the artist after his separation from Venetian reality and his move to Friuli, but I cannot avoid noting that there was no break as far as the specific images created by Lucatello were concerned because they were the necessary forerunners of the canvases with motifs of pebbles of the Tagliamento, of the trees, of the moments of sun and nature. Undoubtedly the materic images of the vegetable gardens and the landscapes of Portosecco, are extraordinarily original answers to the naturalism of Morlotti and the informal painters of Padania loved by Francesco Arcangeli, not less so than the series Tramonti sullo stagno, of the Delta and the Teiere. What I mean to say is that even if the suggestions of the Friuli lands, of its sharp tones, the puzzle of its lights and its shadows had had, and couldn’t have a profound effect on an artist of such voracious visual learning as Lucatello, to think that this was a turning–point would be a complete mistake. All the painter did was to find in the nature of Friuli the external confirmation, in some ways almost objective, of his own way of imagining the reality of painting. As always happens when an artist follows his own internal ghost, this takes form through an autonomous process, even if obviously it is not independent with regard to the facts of nature, sense and feeling which act and interact in the mysterious moment of creation of the work. Lucatello in this was no different from other painters who cultivated their own jealous vocation for free and perhaps even anarchical expression. That his realism was able to take the forms of figural expressionism or of the abstract–concrete, as occurred already half–way through the nineteen–fifties, to reach the results which re–echo the high proposals of Europe and America precisely when he most shows that he wants to isolate himself, is something that amazes us, as miracles of aesthetic intuition always amaze; but this does not mean that that coherence and that formal and linguistic continuity which fundamentally characterizes all Lucatello’s work was upturned or broken. Nothing here appears casual or improvised without a reason, and it doesn’t take much to realize that a not even very fine thread links into one discourse the already mentioned paintings of the Delta or Landscapes of Portosecco, where the matter clots in rhythms violated by screeching tones of colour and which obey an internal pulse, and the paintings where is evident the artist abandon to the fascination of organic disorder. But here again are the inexorable equilibriums of the series of Trees and Moments of nature painted between 1968 and 1969. It is as if Lucatello, at a phase of strong expressio corresponding to the formal dynamics of Venturi’s avant–garde, had submitted to a moment of reflection, of meditated synthesis, without losing the force and the aggression of the composition. The Tree of 1968, whose outline cuts vertically through the space of the canvas defining the divisions of volume, is a figurative image, and at the same time profoundly affecting. It emerges from a basic materic magma in which the wandering forms begin to organise themselves – like that of an Arp with a more dilated sensitivity – which seem to separate themselves even from the bituminous trunk of another painting with Tree of the same year, to later be liberated in the atmospheric song of Moments of nature. A song that is repeated , with the accentuation of a background chromatic blaze, in Land of Friuli of the same year. These paintings I have mentioned are compositions of great breadth, and the very dimensions of the surface in which the painting develops, show that Lucatello tended towards open and dilated research, towards an image that goes beyond traditional limits to open out onto a dimension in which the matter can order itself and float like in a cosmic space. To do this the artist needs to contrast that sort of force of gravity because of which a certain part of the painting serves as a centre of formal attraction towards which all the elements of the composition converge. And it is precisely this operation by Lucatello in Moments of nature and in those works like Dialectic of one dimension in which the matter loses itself in light and in atmosphere, with the exception of certain lumpy residues that resist within the cosmic vortex. And yet, just at the same time in which he paints his works of the most indefinable limits, the artist composes concise paintings where every tension is led back to within the constructive limit which determines the image. Thus still in 1969 there were the blocked syntheses of Land of Friuli:Dialectic of one dimension and Sunset, where the central band is built on the background, within the limit of the sun’s glares, which themselves carry shadows and the weight of the earth. More evident is the dialectic between the refined centrality of the image and the tension at the moment of its breaking into light, if we consider the Sunny moments where the matter is itself the form of the space, a momentary chromatic concrete realisation always on the point of changing state. Comparing these canvases with the works of the same title, where the image in vortex is imprisoned in the limits of a circle, and goes as far as to placate, until it becomes a pure sign, plastic memory, a flaming dizzyness, even in a monochrome, for an upheaval which consumes itself ab aeterno in the dimension of space and matter. These are amongst the most absolute paintings by Lucatello, images with no time or possible space, but of all times and of all places. Forms of poetic bewilderment.
I won’t be the one to deny the very close link that Renzo Viezzi, with his language which re–evokes and poetically reflects things seen and heard in harmony in Lucatello’s works and in the shadows, in the lights, in the colours of the memory of Friuli, institutes between many of these paintings and concrete situations of the days, seasons, and moods of the painter who found himself working in front, or rather inside the myth of nature. But precisly because this was written so limpidly by someone who was able to follow the artist at his work from nearby, and taking into account the fact that this same exhibition repeats the homage by Lucatello to Friuli and to its magic, I would like to pick out, from Viezzi’s writing, the precious indication that the expert gives us referring to the already mentioned paintings on the theme of the Tree. Moving fatally from the particular to the general, from realism to lyrical abstraction precisely because, Viezzi writes, in Lucatello’s paintings at that moment (but already earlier the process was noticeable) “he is putting up a foretaste of a basic structure, an organic quality of emotion that will fill the canvas with a larger sky, and from there soon after will become nature herself”. And yet, if by nature, talking of Lucatello, we mean this giving of organicity, evidently formal, to emotion, or rather this process of structuring is identified with nature itself, then the larger sky coincides with the finite without places or limits of art. So Viezzi is really right when he writes that “Lucatello consumes Friuli”. Bruno Rosada too, what is more, in his fine analysis of Lucatello’s painting and human questions, while remaining faithful to the concept that the period in Friuli has its own determining diversity compared to previous ones, reads as a dominating constant in the artist “the formal research, lived in an experimental dimension”. I believe that this component had always existed in the Venetian painter, even when formalism could in some measure appear guilty to an artist who was sincerely engaged in social and political battles. But we know that in art it is not necessary for the artist to have a critical rational conscience of the motivations that drive him, because these motivations appear in his works. I take the liberty of questioning Rosada’s opinion that says that from “representative and allusive needs” matured by Lucatello in his relationship with the land of Friuli and in particular with the areas of the river Tagliamento, spring those needs of formal nature that only now, writes the critic, “begin to appear in Lucatello’s painting”. It seems that what Lucatello must instead have always known and felt had matured only then, these are Rosada’s words again “the conviction that through composition a message can pass, that analysis of matter can become concrete through the discourse of the organization of the form”. If it were not for the need to make clear that Lucatello is a realist or a naturalist only because in his work forms and reality, nature and symbolic metaphor are indistinguishable from the beginning, there wouldn’t be much to add to the analyses published on the occasion of the exhibition in March–April 1986 at Bevelacqua La Masa by Giselda Lucatello, Bruno Rosada and Renzo Viezzi. Lucatello, like all real artists, has within him his own dimension, his own places, his own space. These are the ghosts which take form and through the form become concrete reality like the things of painting that (it is a very ancient thesis) add themselves to those of nature like a new existence and a new essence and come to complete the world of our sensations and visions.
Thus it is not realism, if this is meant in terms of tendency; it is not abstractism if this means only aesthetic practice which claims to take no account of the infinite grouping and separating of that which we call evidently for some reason “matter”.
Lucatello reveals new dimensions, cosmic and earthly, of our being and of our existing and the whirling of light in a blinding sun, its extension without limits in the vision of a field of corn and the darkening of a very black lump of earth are nothing more than metaphors of the eternal mystery that the rituals of art reveal to us without dissipating the shadows of the enigma that enwraps us all. When Lucatello entitles one of his most disquieting and impenetrable paintings Earth: Relationship Man–Nature he seems to want to give the simplest, most physical image of the substance of a dialectical relationship which is maintained alive only in as much as it can’t become rigid in the resolution of one of the two terms in the other, it can’t become an object, if not through that process of disclosed subjectivity which is poetry. So the paintings of Albino Lucatello , these great parabolas of the imagination which we can penetrate only with our imagination and which are in effect as unfathomable as dreams and the roads of memory, are above all tangible evidence of an impossibility. They reveal a contradiction taking place if one tries to give a rational explaination of them and does not try to get close to their reality, to their nature, with the same soul and the same humility which affects us when we are wrapped up in contemplating something ineffable. Notwithstanding all the attempts at decodifying that can be conducted also in Lucatello’s paintings, what resists in the works is the aura, always assuming that the artist manages to create it in defence and as the secret substance of his own image. It’s not necessary to be a formalist to notice a fact on which, and only because of which, the unrepeatability of a work of art is based, even in the age of its technical reproducibility. Indeed Lucatello builds pictures which are precisely the concretisation of his aura, of that indefinable sense that envelops things and makes them very real and quite unreal at the same time. And even “adorable”, if by this term one means something that can suggest that sensation of lay religiousness that the artist expresses, and that the spectator becomes aware of when facing a poetical work. Like all images invested with religiousness, also for those by Albino Lucatello one can hypothesize a translation into conventional symbols, a paraphrase in terms of language. So after the explanations and warnings that I have tried to give in the first part of this writing, one can also go back to seeing as constituent, essential but not determining elements of his work the shingle of the river Tagliamento, the trees, the dry twigs, the ditches, the mud, the blackened wood, the material concretions, the skies, the dawns and the nights of Friuli, but transfigured in a process of sublimination which is very evident in the “Musi”, where it is the matter that is denied, that dissolves itself into pure light.
At this point it would perhaps be a good idea to make clear in what key naturalism, or the final naturalism of Lucatello, should be read, and how it differs from that of Padania, earthy and full of body at least in the early intuition of the masters, from Morlotti to Moreni. That which in the Lombard tradition is the basic weight of matter and the smell of nature, which in the Emilian one becomes the taste of swollen and bitter turf, in this Venetian painter becomes concrete and together materialises itself in light and in atmosphere.
The great lesson of the ancients and the modern one of Virgilio Guidi, an artist that Lucatello evidently loved very dearly and whom he understood deeply, especially at the time of the experiences of the “whites on white” and of the great compositions on the theme of trees, seems to us to have been profoundly assimilated in the works of 1969, but becomes an element that cannot be ignored when we observe the Landscapes of the eighties, in which dazed bright blues, greens of exquisite transparency, sunny yellows like those of the Corn Fields of the final period of work of the artist sing out. At this point Lucatello has completed his trip through contemporary art, and has assimilated what he could from the great artists, from Picasso to Rothko, Wols, Tapies and Fautrier, up until Hartnung with whom he shares the extraordinary capacity to make a colour out of black: from all those, in short, with whom he felt something in common. Who can contest the illuminating value of a search for references, assonance and connections between the works of art of Albino Lucatello and those of the masters to whom, according to the explicit witness of the critics who were close to him, and the works themselves, the artist felt tied for many reasons? How can one avoid thinking, for example, that the fantastic worlds of Klee came into his canvases diluting themselves until they became, like in Wols, the explorations of secret regions of the human soul. Or that the emptiness, the total white of Tapies did not find its equivalent, outside that is of the nihilist provocation, in the huge surfaces where Lucatello mixed together and made the matter–mark explode? And there we are, precisely for this total cosmic anxiety of being, Lucatello can still deny his work has any historicity, any reduction to the everyday. Like Rothko. At the same time in his works the pure energy of the gesture is exalted, as it becomes a mark and expression, as in Hartnung or it becomes ill in anxiety, in the embryonic pathos of Fautrier’s matter. Other connections could be found, as I said at the beginning.
Lucatello’s work is in fact a work “in dialogue” with all images – aesthetic or non–aesthetic – which crowd into the kaleidoscope of the social visionary, and it is this that makes it so rich in implications, undertones, of obvious and hinted at truths. One can sink into the enigma of his blacks, of his greens, of his saturnine brightness which emanate from the deep recesses of matter–painting; one can feel attacked, on the other hand, by the sunny revelations of the yellows and reds blocked in sudden dizziness on the canvas, almost as if Lucatello had managed to bring back the heat of life to the ancient dead suns of Mediterranean metaphysics. One can reread the spatial emphasis of the primary sign of Capogrossi (or perhaps Hartnung again?) in the fantastic syntheses of the Obstacles. The painting of this artist which is together both modern and ancient contains an infinite number of other connections. For him Valery’s statement that “the skin is the deepest” could have a singular meaning . The gentle weaving of the surfaces are in fact in Lucatello the means of transmitting mysterious messages coming from the depths which exist in us and become, in art, the surface: sign and vibration taking place, the metaphor of an enigma.
One can perhaps maintain that at the beginning of the 1970s Albino Lucatello had already created his own unrepeatable image. All his works that follow on from that moment should be considered nothing more than a continuation, often serene and happy, as happens in the paintings of Flowers or in certain fancies of the notes d’après nature, of a search that even in the moments of deepest anguish remains characterized by a trusting and extraordinarily creative attitude. It is a question of one of the very rare cases in which the artist, we can say, has expressed his own way of being and of suffering his very individual existential truth, not making use of painting, but living it.
For this reason we don’t feel the Obstacles, Pebbles, Moments of nature, Mulberries, Suns, Flowers are only the fruit of a way of seeing, of an emotional and theoretical reflection on things.They are those things and for their artistic valency we can have direct knowledge of them. When Giselda Lucatello writes that in the pictures painted after the tragedy of the earthquake hit Friuli the painter wanted to reaffirm his joy of life, she probably means that painting and living for Lucatello were the same thing. And the covetousness with which , in his final years, he looked in his canvases for larger and larger spaces, and in nature for wider visions of light, the secret element of matter which is really living and infinite, doesn’t surprise.
When one is conscious of the infinite, it is easier to understand that part of infinity which participates in as much as it is thing, object, landscape, situation , person. Albino Lucatello, always more attached to his reality than to that represented in the rarefied language of stylistic modules, could also find again the ancient forms of the “popular” to understand the tragedy of the earthquake, rather than to describe it. For the same reason Lucatello’s “returns”, especially the stylistic ones, are nothing more than the habits of an unmistakable attitude, which continually confirms itself through the image of movement and of diversity.
I would like Lucatello’s art to be considered as an art that, like men, is “born at every minute” because it has always existed and always will. The question of the lasting of a work, if one takes it outside the narrow confines of current sociologism, is based in fact on the presumption of an infinity in which what we call time is energy, that flows from itself to itself.
Of it we can give an aesthetic, abstract and metaphysical image, or a dynamic and similarly sublimated image. Lucatello is metaphysical even when the material quality of painting takes insistent wanted tones, and the fragments of “nature discovered” (the little stones of the shingle) take on the function of constituent parts of “nature invented” which is the characteristic of art. Religiousness and mysticism can easily recognise each other in this attitude of totalising apprehension, and that this is not illegitimate is shown by the fact that many years before Diego Valeri, presenting Lucatello’s works, underlined precisely the mystic sense and the suspension in “a perhaps unconsciously religious waiting”. This becomes even more verifiable the more the painter measures himself against matter, searches for it and transforms it into aesthetic energy, into something, that is, eminently spiritual. Licio Damiani, on the occasion of a one man show held by Lucatello in Udine in 1967, had already briefly summarised what I limit myself to reaffirming on this occasion. He wrote of “a difficult, tiring work of purification of matter, to make it as far as possible limpid and universalised” to subtract it thus from the weight of that nature whose very essence Lucatello was searching for, whose soul was unburnt among the ashes and flashes of the present. Naturally to emphasize what there may be of a spiritual nature in Lucatello’s works may be to suggest the conviction – which in me is actually very strong – that he was a person not totally devoid of some vocation towards asceticism, if to this word we ascribe the meaning suggested by old Tommaseo who said that it suited the monk as it suited the athlete.
Why couldn’t those Soli (Suns) declare themselves the fruit of the tension towards the ineffable that another painter who frequented Venice for a long time, Bruno Saetti, used as a symbol of a possible metaphysics of the everyday, and of a search for a perhaps impossible mystical exaltation, but which is necessary in the face of the degradation of every thing and thought of objects? I had a long contact with the painter from Bologna who searched the lights of the water in Venice for something that was able to resist dissolving, that could resist as a material. I had the luck for years to know as a friend and work with another master, Virgilio Guidi, for whom if nature and spirit could coincide, naturalism and spiritualism were words of no meaning. I don’t think I would be betraying the memory of the two painters who are now dead , so different and yet both so close in being artists of authentic choice, if I say that they were ascetic people in so far as they saw in nature spirituality itself and tried to adjust it with art, through “visionary seeing” which always communicates a little of the sacredness, or of that which we mean commonly mean by this word. A similar way of looking at nature was that of Giorgio Morandi, the painter of the humble Appenines of Bologna, of the little, banal things of daily life: caught in their concreteness and at the same time felt as sharing the universality of the metaphysical dimension. The “tiring work of purification of matter to make it as much as possible clear and universalised” of which Damiani wrote in his text about Lucatello which I earlier referred to, is not different from the efforts of him who moved, maybe starting from completely different premises, the masters of tone and of light from which our culture, I mean the culture of old Europe, cannot be separated. I don’t mean by this that Lucatello, who was always so ready to throw himself into the vortex of the creative gesture, was or could be defined as a Morandian painter. I’m only saying what I have many times repeated on the subject of the master from Bologna, in other words that there is a “Morandian condition” which is inescapable for whoever feels the need for metaphysical applications in the great sea of daily life, and for him who knows how to understand reality as a place of values that, whilst being profoundly human, transcend and together exalt the individual, and his deep mystical earthliness. Art has never given another image except this and it is, I again repeat, a sublimated image the more it tells about real man, about the things of nature which are heavy and full of body; the dry twigs and pebbles of the river Tagliamento, the tormented stones of Venice, the poor land of Grizzana and Friuli, the black meteorites ruined by spaces. Lucatello has however brought to the colour white, making it burning and flaming, an image of nature which would not have been out of place amongst the highest works of spacialism, from which he undertakes a process of alchemic cleansing, reaching the point of answering, with Sunny moments the most insinuating and subtle Lucio Fontana, just as in certain compostions in which the assumption is the Diakectic man–nature he ends up by touching the tones of anguish that Fautrier of the Hostages had revealed to European art. But if in comparison to Fautrier Lucatello reveals less inclination towards an elegance of composition and a formal separation intended as the aim of an art that is disinterested to the point of self–denial (which will precisely be then theorised in the ways of the death of art and of brush–painting), compared to Fautrier the joyous sense of living remains, even if it is humiliated and defeated. His irrepressible vitality puts him into a cultural environment to which belong also Mattia Moreni with his devilish creations, and Burri of the more dramatic combustions. We go back to the area of the Last Naturalism of Arcangeli, who theorised nature as a beat, denying it as an image of a knowable finite.
The Moments of nature painted by Lucatello before he reached the firm synthesis of the Obstacles, seem to agree with those poetics which in the total extension by Francesco Arcangeli include also Pollock.
It’s significant that the Obstacles only shortly precede and are accompanied by other Moments of nature no less strongly structured. In order to reach this point, for Lucatello a documentable rereading of Picasso must have been of some importance, for it led to the fantasies of certain Nocturns. Here the erotic imagination stretches out and looks for a space, anticipating the happy period of the Fòowers, Mulberries and of the new Dimension man–nature composed at the end of the seventies. In Obstacles I cannot see that sense of drama that others have underlined, neither am I very interested in the symbolic valency that these impeccable compositions may have had for Lucatello. Certainly an artist rarely revealed himself more self–assuredly in creating his own image as a formal absolute where if there is drama it is concluded drama, all within the work which stands in proud classicism. There are, it is true, Obstacles where the tension is brought to light, declared, and funereal tones of stormy darkness, lower like a damnation. But I believe that Lucatello is more authentically himself when he shows he knows how to dominate his own tumults and those of the image, when, that is, he reaches that degree of classicism which is the natural outlet of aesthetic and artistic asceticism. However that occurs exactly with those compostions which seem set up by Lucatello as Obstacles against the vocation towards “disorder” which appears again after the tragedy of the earthquake of 1976.
I don’t want to overestimate the biographical data of the artist, but it seems to me symptomatic that those moments which I have defined as those of the most decided classicism of Lucatello, the period of the Obstacles, correspond to the availability of the great spaces of the studio in Vendoglio and the first conscious conviction of achieved serenity. A belief that the earthquake would cruelly come to destroy. Lucatello would have to go over again the phases of ancient passion, both negative and positive, alternating sinking into the very black lumps of matter with illuminations and open pictorial enthusiasms of the visions of nature and of the most splendid Fiori, with the symphonies in green, with the blinding yellows of the Corn fields. But now it is possible to see in what spatial measure the images are held, even those of greater organic sensuality like Nature of Friuli of 1978 and the figurative painting Dialectic man–nature of the same year, owned by the Modern Art Gallery of Udine which is put forward again here. The size is that of the Obstacles, more strongly structured, and the space, in which the image rather than being set creates and determines itself, determining the total image of the picture, is the classical space of the Mediterranean tradition in which the ritual presences of black and whites mixed in unforgettable mortar are repeated. The experience of the Musi (the name of a mountain chaine) will tend to find new life and new vibrations of meaning even beyond this measure of classicism, which has already been obtained and, obeying the usual dialectic aim which forces Lucatello never to block his work on a linguistic scheme that has already been acquired, but to continually examine his premises, the artist breaks down the solid bars of the Obstacles gathering up the shining fragments in the impalpable atmospheric and chromatic blaze of the Musi where the taste of rock, earth and polluted suns vibrates. At this point I don’t consider that the anxiety expressed by Berto Morucchio, in the opening text of a monographic publication on Lucatello published by the Art Gallery of Venice, is unjustified. After a very fine analysis of the questions concerning the painter, from his early works to those which rightly remind him of “the monochromes of Fontana and Yves Klein” but with more weight and sense of nature, Morucchio tries to remove the idea that the artist betrays this love of his for the concrete “inviting us into an Elysium of essences”: this is exactly what Lucatello was doing at that moment, making more and more essential that painting which he felt as pure nature, but recomposed in an extreme act of physical love: the same thing that led him, as his wife Giselda remembers, to screw up canvases “in order to feel the palpitations under the colour”.
At the end of his season Lucatello felt, in short, the need for a total dimension, in which everything could be expressed. The Musi, his companion witnessess again, was for Lucatello the “great project in which once again all his painting is included”: a classical project, reaching out to the metaphysical universality, to the ancient and marvellous silence of painting–painting.

translated by Nicolette S. James