Broken mirror

An essential piece of the painter's first phase of maturity, together with the “Seamstresses” of 1949, it expresses a peculiar evolution within a Neorealist practice. Behind it, was an engaged drawing exercise, plastic and ideologically, in detain the reality that is now called in a distant memory. His women are no longer exclusively peasants or workers – what they can continue to be - transmuting themselves into Mannerist, stylized and a-historical signs that do not intend to narrate injustice - an immediate challenge to neorealist “meanings" - but open the indeterminate space of the interrupted gestures. In this case, the mythography of the mirror, an immediate metaphor of painting works. In this thematic shift, the painter was also drifting plastically, engaging in the rhythms of colors and the invention of false volumes on slowly contoured surfaces, arranging rhymes, brief interruptions and symmetries as if evoking an early pre-Renaissance situation in which the space of the screen invents and conceals its planimetry. The diligent work of matter, the runny overlapping of timbres and tones are the most outstanding quality of this work that will have led the author to the taste of the fullness of the volume that the following career as ceramist would confirm.