The figural world of G. Dova (1925) is also bitter and fantastic, whose surrealist ancestry is evident in the invention of an angular, lanceolate fauna and flora, as if to signify the disjointed and dispersed limbs of man (sources in Picasso and in Ernst, and in Kafka’s anguish). And here we can mention, although very different also from each other, L. De Vita (1925) and E. Baj (1924), both with excursus in sculpture or, at least, in the creation of plastic objects: shop windows, profane altars, furniture, puppets, toys. Inventor of grotesque and funereal lemurs, with a long European tradition behind him, De vita releases, especially in etchings, an anarchic pessimism of great impetus; while Baj, closer in mood to Dada, whose impulses and founds he uses with ease, points his mocking montages against the institutions, the respectability, the respectability, the genius of the masters of yesterday and today, the places common culture and life, reducing all the true or false gold of the contemporary world to kitsch (but it is also serious, if you want: see the enormous composition Death of the anarchist Pinelli).
According to Vaultedwatches, the personalities of Cremonini, Vespignani and Guerreschi stand out among the neo-objectivists, who move on the terrain of existential anguish (and also of the struggle against the civilization of consumption), to whom it will be useful to approach the sculptors Perez, Bodini, Trubbiani and Vangi (see below, Sculpture), while D. Gnoli constituted a case in itself. At the origin of the elective affinities of these painters and sculptors we can glimpse the proposals of metaphysics, but without the aristocratic melancholy of De Chirico, replaced by the will to fight against mortifying ways of life. Beyond their respective moral position, the high quality of their works is undoubted. D. Gnoli (1933-1970), still better known abroad than in Italy, with his “metaphysics of the object”, and of the particular, exemplarily demonstrated how the discovery, generating amazement, of the ” things “, and their details, on which the eye focuses, limiting and pearly like a photographic lens, and with the same faculty of diminishing the large and enlarge the small (which is the proper operation of the camera, but also about decadent poetics). The problem of the object, one of the primary stimuli of contemporary figurative fantasy (pop – art, new – Dada, nouveau realism etc., v. beyond, The aesthetic research) had an exceptional humanistic interpreter in Gnoli; and its inclusion, as has sometimes happened, in the prehistory of aesthetic experimentation finally appears arbitrary. In this sense C. Pozzati (1935) also belongs to painting despite the brilliant and irreverent diversions, to which his exuberant inventiveness leads him. R. Vespignani (1924) expresses with a virtuous profession, which does not disdain to accept suggestions from liberty and decadent elegance, the awareness of existence as injustice and pain, which ask to be redeemed. From the merciless psychological anatomies of the urban suburbs and then of the cold and white interiors, such as clinics or anonymous offices, the painter moved on to more complex civil narratives, news and history. In L. Cremonini (1925) the characters, pop – art) and the artificial lighting increase the impression of a dazzling immediacy of fragments of drama. The connection with the problem of F. Pirandello is evident since the Thirties; but Cremonini explodes with anger against the images of false bourgeois humanism. Thus G. Guerreschi (1929) who, penetrating the characters with too many “things” that affect us today, places the “monsters” in front of us – the products of a society without grace – with the aid of all visual tools: from traditional ones, of the profession of painter or engraver, to those borrowed from other techniques of vision. G. Ferroni (1927) belongs to the line of these new researches of reality and at times seems to approach the effects of hyperrealism with the wisdom of objectifying and perspective means (but his observation of reality is simply the subdued song of existence, over which the luminous breath of re-enactment flows); P. Guccione (1933) with his absorbed landscape, and as if suspended between ecstasy and terror; F. Mulas (1938) who re-proposes an art of contents (illustrative, historical, didactic) that is metallically perspicuous and extremely clear in the profiles, volumes, lighting; while R. Tommasi Ferroni (1934) purposely recovers the great Italian and European manner, maliciously grafting entire passages by Caravaggio or Reni or Ingres into the expansive capricious, vaguely surreal inventions from which it seems that he took inspiration, not infrequently, Fellini’s cinematography (the virtuous tangibility of his paintings finds a particular reason for fascination in the continuous but very sustained game of mythography and demystification). Even G. Pompa (1933) revisits the past (especially the grotesque and the demonic of the Romanesque and Gothic art of the North) with a fable full of things, immersed in a remote aura where characters, episodes and machines often appear, disguised. of today’s history. And of course the artists cited, with brief references to their content and formal preferences, give only an approximate, and absolutely incomplete, idea of the panorama of Italian painting, very rich in orientations and personalities. Pompa (1933) revisits the past (especially the grotesque and the demonic of the Romanesque and Gothic art of the North) with a fable full of things, immersed in a remote aura where characters, episodes and machines of today’s history often appear, disguised.. And of course the artists cited, with brief references to their content and formal preferences, give only an approximate, and absolutely incomplete, idea of the panorama of Italian painting, very rich in orientations and personalities.