Gian Giacomo Dal Forno - Three Women

The human figure has always been at the center of artistic research. Since the classical age, the naturalistic rendering of human anatomy has been a primary goal of painters and sculptors throughout history. The representation of the female figure is an expression of this aspiration, which spans all eras and stylistic movements. Indeed, in addition to the naturalistic interpretations of the Renaissance and various classicisms, which aimed for a truthful and detailed representation of the human body, the female figure has also been a central figure in the new aesthetic concepts brought about by the historical avant-garde, such as Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. The female figure is central to the research of the painter Gian Giacomo Dal Forno. His enigmatic women, in addition to giving rise to extremely interesting works from a formal perspective, are characterized by profound symbolic implications.

Gian Giacomo Dal Forno's artistic production seeks to combine the concrete exaltation of plastic values ​​with a mechanomorphic reconstruction of tangible reality. The protagonists of his works are female figures, enigmatic and hieratic. Their proportions are often monumental, in a free expansion of volumes. These volumes, however, are represented through a process of analytical decomposition and reconstruction typical of Cubism. The artist seeks to possess the entire structure of his subjects, considering all possible developments in time and space. Therefore, their forms unfold in a space that is no longer univocal, founded on a single perspectival center, but multidimensional, structured by the overlapping and incidence of planes. The synthesis achieved through Cubist decomposition strongly abstracts these figures, which, combined with their already symbolic nature, imbues them with an expressive force and a mysterious allure. In the present painting, however, we can see how the analytical decomposition is toned down in favor of the plastic exaltation of the three subjects, achieved through a marked process of geometricization. The three women seem to overlap in a synchronicity of time and space thanks to Dal Forno's refined technique, consisting of very light and transparent glazes. As is typical of this painter's style, the composition is based on a consistent tonal palette of grays.

Gian Giacomo Dal Forno was born in Catania in 1909 and died in Milan in 1989. A graduate of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, from 1930 to 1940 he exhibited at the Milanese trade union exhibitions, the Lombardy interregional exhibitions, and the Rome quadrennial exhibitions, winning the Ambrosiano Prize for Drawing in 1933, the Gold Medal at the Milan Triennale in 1934, and, in 1938, the Medardo Rosso Prize and the Fumagalli Prize from the Brera Academy. At the 7th Milan Triennale in 1940, he frescoed a 100-square-meter wall with "Women's Work," a composition of approximately three hundred life-size figures, alongside Carlo Carra and Mario Sironi, for which he received a gold medal from the Triennale. He won the Cremona Prize in 1941 and the Verona City Prize in 1942 and, in the same year, he was invited to the XXIII Venice Biennale. In 1944 he exhibited his first solo show at the Borromini Gallery in Como and a subsequent one in Milan in 1945, before continuing in various cities in Lombardy.

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