The House of Trust

The painter entered this work for the Cariplo annual painting prize of 1962, the subject of which was trust, and was declared joint winner together with Renato Vernizzi, whose entry, The Reunited Family, also belongs to the Cariplo Collection. The two works demonstrate how the same subject can be addressed in terms of very different iconographic and stylistic formulas, which in this case also reflects the fact that the artists belonged to equally different generations. In contrast to the evident intimism of Vernizzi, Guerreschi displays the objective vision of life and the places of contemporary civilisation that distinguishes his painting of the period, as exemplified also by Invaded City (1960, Gallarate, Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna).Guerreschi learned his craft during the second half of the 1950s in the circles of Existential Realism, a school of painters like Gianfranco Ferroni, Bepi Romagnoni and Tino Vaglieri pursuing the idea of an interpretation of reality guided by personal experience rather than ideological convictions, contrary to the art of Renato Guttuso and other contemporaries. Each of these artists embarked on different artistic path in the years that followed, and Guerreschi was distinguished by his ability to read and analyze the life of a metropolis like Milan. The recurrent images captured on canvas include TV aerials on the rooftops and tenement blocks on the city outskirts, “objective” elements that enter into dialogue with other presences of apparently lesser importance, such as the deckchair in the Cariplo work. The contrast between the impersonal architecture of the urban outskirts, albeit lightened by a clear blue sky, and an everyday object conjures up the idea of holidays and seems to put forward a positive concept of trust as something to be found, on close examination, even in what appear to be the drabbest parts of the city. The antithesis is also pictorial, the background being dominated by the intense black of the building, applied in thick, rough strokes, and the foreground by the brighter colours of yellow, red and orange spray paint.