In a few years, perhaps paintings will no longer exist and therefore not even painters, much less the art galleries that already today gather in conclave on websites to discuss mere market prices between one artist and another.
What art is, what it represents, what its function is in the collective consciousness of a people and a territory no longer seems to interest anyone, the important thing is to know its value on a cosmic business center that has lost the most elementary human characteristics. Art, which until now has characterized Man as a representation of a time and a place in the social and economic history of the country, has totally lost its sense of glue between one era and another. Today there is a frightening void, in which we all seem to spin like crazy ions without respite.
Because it is not enough to free the spirit from matter to make a canvas a work of art, it takes effort and studies and years of isolation and friendships together, being caught up in the vortex and at the same time being able to stay out of it. The incorporeal that becomes corporeal, the God that becomes flesh, the essence that becomes substance. Vocatio is not an abstract concept, Hillman asserted, it is a physiological need of Man to get out of his labyrinth trying not to end up like Icarus, not to burn everything and above all not to burn himself.
Cesare Peruzzi did not take this risk, he was sent to the Art School of Macerata from a very young age, he who was from Recanati like Leopardi, where he met Ivo Pannaggi who then encouraged him to take the path of painting. Theseus immediately found Ariadne, in this sense.
He moved to Rome where he enrolled at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, it was 1915 and he exhibited at the International Secession Exhibition together with names of the caliber of Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, Casorati and Guidi. After the First World War fought in Albania, he returned to Rome and enrolled at the Academie de France, specializing in nude art.
Peasants at the table, 1927. Palazzo Buonaccorsi – Civic Museums of Palazzo Buonaccorsi – Macerata
What attracts him is the person, his humanity purified by affected expressions, the figures are real and realistic, historical representations of a period between impressionism and expressionism, he captures the daily life of a peasant family at the table where the polenta is eaten directly on the spindola and immediately becomes the realist manifesto of the Marche sharecropping society of the early twentieth century, highlighting its poverty but also the attachment to the family focus, with the vergaro, his children and the vergara with the handkerchief on her head. We would like to see more, hungry for news on the economic and social corpus of the time, decidedly stingy in describing the real life situation of the poor people in the Marche and we see the fork used by the little girl, the glove in the background and the jugs on the shelves and that bread, great, significant, immense. Bread is the symbol of poverty that is well, despite everything, bread is a Eucharistic symbol of life, of the future, of redemption and of distancing itself from evil. As long as there is bread there is hope, one might say.
We love his portraits of Cesare Peruzzi, the children playing on the sand at the seaside, two world wars have passed in the meantime, things have changed, he spans the entire twentieth century with his art, given that he was born in 1894 and lived until 1995, a true lyrical representative of a strong century and its relative transitions from a Catholic familism to an infertile individualism up to the current globalism that has lost its soul. Cesare Peruzzi's painting helps us to find it again, even if only for a few moments.
Lorenza Cappanera
