Archivio Casorati
FRANCESCO CASORATI – OPERA INCISA

Description

The volume is dedicated to the graphic work of Francesco Casorati and is the catalog of the homonymous retrospective exhibition, set up at the Central Institute for Graphics in Rome which presented to the public a selection of about sixty sheets made with intaglio engraving techniques from 1952 to 1995.
For Francesco Casorati, graphics represented a parallel and never subordinate sphere to painting. On the contrary, one of the most acute interpreters of his work, Luigi Carluccio, noted that the “experiences of the engraver at times surpassed or preceded his work as a painter”. In full freedom and in dialogue with an international context, Casorati explored all the potential of engraved graphics, dedicating himself to multiple experiments on materials, etching methods, signs and colors. Examples, in this sense, are the variants, in print, of “Battaglia” (1954) or the two versions of “Battaglia dei tre cavalieri” (1957). With the same freedom the artist went through the informal period, represented in the exhibition with sheets exhibited in the personal room at the 1962 Venice Biennale, and then the phase close to the committed figuration (“The smoked house”, “The tree and the train” , both from 1967), in which the playful and narrative character that always accompanied the work of Francesco Casorati remains. In the seventies, the theme, rooted in the specularity inherent in printed graphics, of twinning and refraction of the image appeared, taking shape in fabulous bestiaries and dizzying graphic labyrinths. It will be the absolute purity of the sign, the etching “writing”, to dominate the last phase, in which the synthesis does not exclude refined and allusive, at times disturbing, expressive solutions.