Frittelli arte contemporanea is pleased to present the second appointment of the 2019/2020 exhibition season, dedicated to one of the most relevant artists of the post World War II period: Corrado Cagli. Paura del Totem [Fear of the Totem].

The exhibition aims to offer a comprehensive view of the magical-totemic imagery present in the painting of Corrado Cagli, an artist who from the outset made the urgency of a profound renewal of artistic language his own. The search for figurative and above all sign-like archetypes, always translated into an autonomous and personal style, emerges in the artist's various formal experiences.

In the artworks on display, the reality of the visible and the unconscious, the memory and the foreboding, coexist in a continuous attempt to explore the modern world in a primitive, barbaric and "mysterious" key, with recurrent references to the thought of Carl Gustav Jung.

Working beyond the contraposition of figuration and non-figuration, Cagli claims his own creative nomadism in terms of freedom of imagination and expression. 

The exhibition brings together more than fifty artworks executed between 1946 and 1973, starting with a series of black and white oils on paper from the late 1940s, Il pastore [The Shepherd] and La lanterna [The Lantern], from which a powerful, uninterrupted gestural sign emerges, continuing with Impronte [Footprints] and Chimera from 1950 in which the superimposition of chromatic matter occurs through fragments soaked in color, or through graffiti of rupestrian inspiration. From the period 1954-55 there are a series of small wooden board, including Paura del Totem [Fear of the Totem], made with wax on paper glued on wood, which deepen the research on archetypes, drawing on figural sources from non-European civilizations.

Then come the artworks on paper from the late 1950s, obtained by airbrush pulverization of color, such as Apparizione [Appearance] and Il Monaco [The Monk], marked by the emergence of a ghostly object.

We also find Le Siciliane [The Sicilians], a splendid pictorial cycle inspired by the sunshine and Mediterranean nature of Sicily, including Turi-mnesia and Pupiddunanau, brightly colored inks on paper alluding to Mycenaean, Etruscan and Phoenician myths.

Finally, sculptures such as Fonte di Fauno [Fountain of Faun], a bronze from 1965, and the 1973 tapestry Enigma Solare [Solar Enigma] document the artist's wide-ranging exploration.

“No one knows anything about the psyche” Cagli stated in 1959, “except the perimeter of an impenetrable labyrinth where, however, associative processes probe and draw from an unlimited mishmash, subjects, words, forms, sensations, in order to communicate and express. No one, however, has investigated more than the moderns the depth of those sediments that conceal, in scattered seeds, the memory of human history.”