Di semplicità e di brivido
in collaboration with Davide Ferri
Di semplicità e di brivido consists of a dialogue, suggested in a non-dogmatic and non-philological way, between 25 works by one of the most important painters of the 20th century in Italy, Filippo de Pisis (Ferrara, 1896 – Milan 1956), and the works of seven international painters – Richard Aldrich (Hampton, 1975), Michael Berryhill (El Paso, 1972), Luca Bertolo (Milan, 1968), Paul Housley (Stalybridge, UK, 1964), Merlin James (Cardiff, UK, 1960), Mairead O’hEocha (Dublin, 1962), Maaike Schoorel (Santpoort, 1973) – invited to establish an interaction with the works of de Pisis, in order to bring out certain aspects of timeliness in a less well-known portion of his oeuvre, belonging to the period from the 1940s to his death in 1956.
The pieces by De Pisis are presented along two lines of research. On the one hand, the drawings and works on paper, mostly depicting human figures, whose subjects are the bodies of the young men desired and loved by the artist, recorded with immediacy and loose contours, seeming to fade into the surface (“legs, arms, feet, hands, eyes, throbbing,” de Pisis himself writes in one of his many poems). On the other, a series of paintings all made in the final phase of his career, from his return to Italy from Paris and his hospitalization at Villa Fiorita. This “later style” (as Edward Said called it) is marked by a leaning towards mixed media (oils, inks, pastels and pencils), the accentuation of an expressionistic and at the same time syncopated character; by the emergence of more liquid lines, marks and signs, assertive and fragmentary; by the tendency to reformulate his language, also by means of gaps, omissions and subtractions, and an immediacy in relation to the subjects; by an apparent naïveté and a certain agitation or quality of outburst; by a lacerated and depleted form, with an even more vivid disjunction between the planes of the image and its proportions, which had always been one of his characteristics. This is the period in which that “bleeding sense of humanity” described in 1947 by Giovanni Comisso, a close friend of the artist, emerges most clearly, “a bleeding sense of humanity with respect to all the collapses of life, to all fragile beauties and tender hopes.”
Di semplicità e di brivido – de Pisis himself used these words (“of simplicity and thrill”) in 1949 to define the essential constituents of his own recent style of painting – sets out to avoid any theoretical rigidity, instead becoming a sort of score in which de Pisis offsets the invited artists, and vice versa. The dialogue can of course unfold in faint recurrences of subject, but it develops above all from an idea of impulsive, automatic and at the same time apparently unresolved, contrasted and “provisional” figuration, aspects that were always at the center of de Pisis’ later style, and of some of the most significant research conducted on his painting in the present.
Di semplicità e di brivido is organized by P420 in collaboration with Davide Ferri and the Associazione per Filippo de Pisis of Milan.
Exhibition Works
Paul Housley, Dogs on Leashes Cats run free, 2021, oil on canvas, cm.80x60
Filippo de Pisis, Pugile, 40's, watercolor on paper, cm.48,5x35
Filippo de Pisis, Nudo disteso, 1935, pastel on paper, cm.23,4x34,2
Filippo de Pisis, Nudo di ragazzo, 1930, Indian ink and watercolor on paper, cm.31,9x44,8
Luca Bertolo, Untitled, 20#12, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm.250x200
Filippo de Pisis, Natura morta con radicchio e mele, 1949, oil on canvas board, cm.35x59
Merlin James, Summer Sea, 2004-2006, mixed media on canvas, cm.48,5x58,5
Filippo de Pisis, Farfalle sull’iris, 1950, oil on canvas, cm.40,5x83,5
Filippo de Pisis, Nudo maschile, 1938-1939, watercolor and pencil on cardboard, cm.41x33
Maaike Schoorel, Rugen Sunlight, 2019, oil on canvas, cm.160x100
Maaike Schoorel, Stone and Flowers, 2016, oil on canvas, cm.70x50
Filippo de Pisis, Fiori, 1944, watercolor on paper, cm. 24,3x16,9
Filippo de Pisis, Natura morta, 1953, oil on canvas, cm.30x40,4
Michael Berryhill, pipe & pelican, 2021, oil on linen, cm.61x46
Filippo de Pisis, Natura morta con pesce, 1951, oil on canvas board, cm.34,6x49,4
Filippo de Pisis, Brugherio, 1948, oil on canvas, cm.49,5x65
Filippo de Pisis, Vaso di Fiori, 1949-50, oil on canvas, cm.61x50,6
Mairead O’hEocha, Tulips Reinagle 2, 2016, oil on board, cm.70x52
Paul Housley, Boxer and Trainer, 2021, oil on canvas, cm.60x50
Filippo de Pisis, Natura morta con uva, 1944, oil on board, cm.29,5x34,9
Richard Aldrich, Untitled, 2018, oil, wax and enamel on linen, cm.213,4x 147,3
Filippo de Pisis, La lettera azzurra, 1952, oil on canvas board, cm 23,2x30
Filippo de Pisis, I due Pomodori, 1950, oil on paper mounted on canvas, cm.34,9x50
Filippo de Pisis, Brocca con Fiori, 1952, oil on canvas board, cm.35x20
Filippo de Pisis, Vaso di fiori, 1952, oil on canvas, cm.51x41
Filippo de Pisis, Vaso di fiori, 1951, oil on canvas, cm.49,6x39,3
Filippo de Pisis, Natura Morta con bottiglie, 1952, oil on canvas, cm.30x20
Filippo de Pisis, Ritratto maschile, 1932, pencil on paper, cm.27,2x21,7
Filippo de Pisis, Ritratto di Ragazzo, 1930, pencil on paper, cm.32,1x22,8
Filippo de Pisis, Volto di ragazzo, 1931, watercolor on paper mounted on canvas, cm.40,9x25,9
Merlin James, Tree, 2006, mixed media on canvas, cm.30x40
Filippo de Pisis, Marinaio, 1933, watercolor and pastels on paper, cm.25x17,5
Merlin James, Boy, sd, mixed media on canvas, cm.61,5x53,5
Filippo de Pisis, Vaso con fiori, 1943 circa, oil on cardboard, cm.30x21
Richard Aldrich, Untitled, 2016-2018, oil and wax on panel, cm.35,6x 27,9
Filippo de Pisis, Vecchio nel cortile, 1941, oil on canvas board, cm.30x20
Paul Housley, Des League Du Mort, 2021, oil on canvas, cm.51x40
Filippo de Pisis, I cenciaioli, 1940, oil on canvas board, cm.10,5x15
Michael Berryhill, tussie-mussie, 2021, oil on linen, cm.51,5x39
Filippo de Pisis, Vaso di fiori con ventaglio, 1942, oil on canvas, cm.80,5 x 59,5
Michael Berryhill, company, 2021, oil on linen, cm.76x66
Filippo de Pisis, Fiori, 1952, watercolored china on paper, cm.33,3x24,4
Luca Bertolo, natura morta 17#02, 2017, oil on board, cm.70x60