The Roman years of the Ligurian artist Francesco Vaccarone are on display at Palazzo Merulana

It is in this context that Palazzo Merulana’s choice to host the exhibition takes place, to offer the public further inspiration for reading twentieth-century Roman art, alongside those offered by the works of the Elena and Claudio Cerasi Collection, kept here. His way of exploring the relationship between figure and space, memory and urban (and interior) landscape on canvas and plates through his incisive sign partly derived from the Roman period (and the encounters that arose from it). In Rome, in fact, Vaccarone frequented the Stamperia Il Cigno, a crossroads for artists such as Burri, Capogrossi and Afro, Marini, Gentilini, Guttuso and Fieschi, and became a point of reference for the Roman School.

It was a crucial phase in his life, which coincided with the tail end of the economic boom and the entry into the years of protest and his artistic maturity. “The Roman period undoubtedly marked his artistic path – writes Paolo Asti – the shift in thought caused in those years ensured that the idea that art was first of all a practice, a way of life was consolidated in him, allowing me to understand how it is a mistake to see the artist’s work as a result, because the true work of the artist is, in truth, a way of being in the world”.

In selecting the works on display, the two curators wanted to narrate this journey. Examples of early works introduce the poetics of the Ligurian master. Think, for example, of the ‘Mythophanies’, in which he reveals an ability to draw visions from materials, with an early intuition regarding what will happen, and an assemblage example that testifies to his encounter with visual poetry. Some paintings in ‘transition’ (‘Adam’, ‘Hermaphrodite’, ‘Fisherman’, ‘Blindman’s Fly’) introduce him to subsequent experiences, in which his full maturity is clear, not foreign to the cultural environment in which this part of his training takes place.

Umberto Croppi writes: “Rome represents, for Vaccarone, the arrival at a synthesis between the avant-garde and the great Italian pictorial and engraving tradition. While he worked as an engraver, he did not abandon his pictorial practice: indeed, those were the years in which he began the most significant cycles of his production, those which he dedicated to the ‘Seagulls’ and the ‘Clochards’. It is in this series of works that he defines his very personal profile in a form of semi-abstractism, following two parallel lines. The theme of Ligurian origins, symbolized in the flight of sea birds, a sign of movement and freedom, and the urban theme of marginalization and defeat, which also implies an ironic streak, which will be a constant in the life as well as in the poetics of the master”.

Color becomes matter, capable of giving that volume which, in other creations, it has rendered through layers and thicknesses; the identification of the themes is a sort of declaration of his inner universe and his feelings. To testify to his commitment as an engraver, a rare copy of the folder of engravings ‘In articulo amoris’ is exhibited, emblematic both for the technique and for the pun of the title which attests to his inclination for the semantic game and the feeling that animates it. Proof of his time in Rome and his acquaintances are the portraits of famous people he painted in line, capturing their characters with a few, decisive signs. Among these are a charcoal sketch by Alberto Moravia, made at Cigno, the Study for Renato Guttuso, or the portrait of Enzo Carli sketched in ink on an envelope in 1973. A dutiful and eloquent citation is the one dedicated to his two masters. The portrait that Gino Bellandi made of the young artist, and a Gulf of La Spezia, by Giuseppe Caselli.