Double Portrait. The Friends

Achitect Mario Asnago was also a busy painter working from the time of his early years when he was training at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. His sensitivity to colour, preferring pastel shades, stems from his frequenting of the studio of the late Divisionist painter Emilio Longoni. His works reach out beyond mere representation of the subject to investigate the intimate and hidden dimensions of things. Though there were some rare abstract works, Asnago preferred to express his personal creativity in figurative works, which he tackled with a style that was influenced by the climate of the “return to order”. The language of Double Portrait. The Friends, although painted later, can nevertheless be ascribable to this essential and dry style. It is devoid of any real portrait connotation, the faces themselves are not really defined, as the two men seem caught in a timeless, almost metaphysical dimension. It is just this aspect, elusive and mysterious, that brings this painting by Asnago closer to “magic realism,”in which each image suggests contents that go beyond the dimension of the present time and place and historical context to explore more general and universal themes, such as, the nature of friendship.(E. Di Raddo)