On the way to the market

Sometimes critics, in an anachronistic attitude, would ask Silva Porto for the great opus. One response may have been this "The Return of the Market". Superior example of the artist's solar painting shows the earth and the blue sky separated by a strip of animals and men, in an attempt to balance the figure and inhabiting the landscape. The blue of the sky is graded from the deepest to the turquoise; the landscape of Mediterranean vegetation, where the earthy tones predominate, receives the shadows crudely painted. The red of the parasol, in addition to luminous counterpoint, suggests a thermic note to the landscape. The spontaneous appointment in a search of a new pictoriality gives place to a more reliable finishing to the referent, organized by a traditional composition scheme. In the foreground, the dog that moves away from the slow march of the donkeys inscribes the snapshot of the scene. The theme of the painting consents to the memory of Courbet's "Paysans de Flagey revenant de la foire". As in this one, it represents an important moment of the life of the rural population. But in "The Turn of the Market" we are not facing a representation of the various social classes, but a look on the picturesque and colorful local. This aspect allows us to situate the naturalism of Silva Porto within an alienation of the culture of international modernity, and also increasingly detached from the initial pictorial concerns, while leaving the testimony of an understanding of light as a presence that will last for generations.