About the artist:

Between the fifties and the early sixties: between painting and graphics. Painting therefore takes root and is justified in the graphic faculty of drawing (it is a general rule that without drawing faculty not even painting is given, a rule which is often disregarded but not for this lapsed). Therefore the graphic activity of Francesco Casorati is from the beginning essential to his research, and often reveals the key. In the second monograph on the graphic work, published by Salamon in 1973, Carluccio underlines it immediately: "In the work of Francesco Casorati the part that has always been expressed with great efficacy through the use of the typical techniques of the graphic work has a constant importance, it could even be considered, if we pay attention to its quantity and its continuity , a privileged part: on the sheets of linoleum in the early times, then on the lithographic stones, on the plates of copper, zinc, brass and iron, thus also grading the rapid aggressions of the steel points and the slow bite of the acids , from the simpler development processes, the classic ones, to the more complex ones, the engraver's experiences punctually accompanied the painter's work, sometimes overtaken him, or preceded him, experimenting in a way still open, that is, lively and aimed at limit, its narrative intentions and its formal structures. After all, on the slabs of Francesco Casorati the vision of the graphic willingly incorporates the painter's knowledge and taste problems " . A dialectic between pictorial sensitivity of the sign and graphic plot that matures and is particularly evident with the engraving series of "Battaglie" and "Cacce alla luna" (1959-63), where the pictorial use of the aquatint (as in "Images ", of 1962) and of the soft varnish (in" Battaglia ", 1963) and the radical and nervous trace of the aquaforte (in" Battaglia sulla collina "1962) alternate or combine creating" tangles "and" figurations " of great intensity but also reinventing a limited repertoire of images and themes through the incessant expressive redefinition of the technical and visual elaborate. It is the exemplary case of the metamorphosis of the "Moon hunt" of 1963 which was born as an etching on zínco, yes aníma dí of lights and background with the spring water to be absorbed by a nocturnal aquatint which dissolves the graphic plot in "pictorial" plot . Through the difference in technique Casorati rethinks the same image (the difference in vision also involves a difference in technique; since art is originally "techne", the mode of being - the pictorial and graphic specific - coincides with the way of doing ); and this return on similar elements and scenarios to prove the infinite possible variations - in the technical and expressive modalities - constitutes another central aspect of his conception of artistic practice. We will later deal with the implications regarding the "vocabulary" of painting, here it is sufficient to recall that it is precisely in repetition, even obsessive, that authentic "difference" is produced, without disturbing the ancients or icon painters, they have it demonstrated without appeal Cezanne, Morandí, or Giacomettí, for whom "the adventure, the great adventure, is seeing something unknown arise, every day, in the same face". The reiterated figure reveals its essential, modular scheme, reproducing itself as a rhythmic motif, thus, always in the context of the Pitturagrabca dialectic, in the tempera on panel "Officina", dated '56, and in the homonymous aquatint on iron the following year, The play of the structures and gears of the interior of a workshop results in a reimic score of surfaces clearly marked (with a positive-negative reversal between painting and engraving), so as to evoke the sonorous dimension of that mechanical "orchestra", Here, on the threshold between figuration and abstraction (similar in layout to the "officina" there are also several "countries" and "landscapes" of the second half of the fifties), the "Scaffolding" of the Parisian period comes to mind - for the paintings - by Mondrian, who declined the Cubist experience in the two-dimensional abstraction of the rhythmic module. Certainly in the first production of Francesco Casorati they are more easily traceable - as indicated by Paolo Fossati in the text of the monograph on the graphic work, published by Gian Ferrari in 1967 - an expressionist ancestry in the synthesis operated between external vision and inner vision, or the an imprint of the art nouveau graphic style, the fact remains, beyond the possible references (which we have already seen not to be decisive for Francesco), that the rhythmic motif is an essential key to reading.