This is how Ottone Rosai's work presents itself, repetitive and varied, languid and almost naïf at the same time, with its still and melancholy figures; and so the Tuscan artist, who starts his pictorial and cultural path in the context of avant-gardism of "Lacerba" and the futurism of Ardengo Soffici and Carlo Carrà, to later conjugate them with Masaccio's and Piero della Francesca's strict perspective lesson, is presented in Arezzo with an anthology that occupies a section of the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea of the Tuscan city until the 20th January 2002.

The exhibition, organised by Luigi Cavallo in association with Giovanni Faccenda, director of the Arezzo Gallery, retraces - through eighty or so works, mad eup of drawings and pantings, some shown to the public for the first time -  the artistic and personal story of Ottone Rosai. "Umanità: pittura e segno" is the title of this retrospective which captures in full the artist's main interest for that humble, simple and good-natured humanity that peoples the streets, the squares, the coffee rooms of his Florence with its small bourgeoisie patrons, strictly in overcoat and hat.

Rosai's is a backward path starting from human figure to investigate not their physicality by any means, but the interior world. Heads turned, figures seen from behind, looks semi covered by hats' brims move our attention onto the intimacy of this humanity, injured and marked by the dramatic experiences of the First World War - the "Suonatori ambulanti", irrevocably marked by the conflict - but also full of desire for returning to the quiet life of always, to the shops of the beloved and often painted "Via Toscanella", where common women rush, dressed like the 14th-15th century altar-pieces.

All Rosai's works are veiled by a sense of arcane suffering, of interior anguish, so much so as to push the spectator to feel a kind of tenderness before these painful and silent figures, though true carriers of a painful streak of our past, of the image of a country which tries to return to normality after the tragedy of wartime experience. Suspended figures, metaphysical presences drawn with a hand, made secure by the careful and devoted study of the great masters of the past, from Giotto's 14th century '300 to Macchiaioli's atmosphere-filled and fugacious painting.

Rosai. Umanità: pittura e segno.
Arezzo, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea
Sala di Sant'Ignazio, Via Carducci 7
Opening times: working days 10.00 am -1.00 pm, 16-20; holidays 10.00 am - 8.00 pm, closed mondays
Entry fee: full £ 10.000, reductions £ 5.000
Catalogue: Masso delle Fate Edizioni, pp.280, £ 50.000
Info: 0575 377507   
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January.2002

Museionline
Arezzo Municipality