Domenico Cantatore - Men of the South

The painting can be defined as a genre scene, that is, the depiction of an episode of everyday life that, apparently, lacks any significant element. These types of domestic subjects were long considered minor and only began to spread in Western art starting in the 17th century. Only with the development of 19th-century realism did everyday subjects become considered as important as historical or religious ones. The Impressionists, in particular, favored subjects related to modern life in urban, bourgeois settings.

The composition of this painting reveals the influence that the rationality of the Italian pictorial tradition exerted on Cantatore. The entire surface of the work is punctuated by bold, dark lines, almost forming a grid that composes the figures of popular extraction. The subjects are constructed through a series of pure lines, which break down and recompose the faces and bodies in a predominantly flat composition that seeks volume precisely through the complexity of the drawing and nevertheless strives for expressionistic simplification. The overall rhythm of the work, based predominantly on broken lines, can also be considered expressionist in nature.

After initially training as a self-taught artist and gaining initial experience in Milan, Cantatore moved to Paris in 1932, where he met Picasso and the Fauves, updating his artistic language to the historical avant-garde. Despite this, Cantatore remained faithful to a figurative tradition, albeit interpreting it with an attitude toward expressionist synthesis. He never belonged to any artistic group. In general, after the great season of the historical avant-garde, a desire for a return to order, objectivity, and the recovery of plastic values ​​spread throughout European painting, and Cantatore embraced this desire with his monumental subjects. He passed away in Paris in 1998.

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