Critique
Alessandro
Parronchi
Florence, 12/26/1914 – Florence, 01/06/2007
He was an Italian poet, art historian, and literary critic
Caciotti — a tormented, shy man — has created, and continues to create, a body of work spanning over forty years: frequent, impulsive, and vast in both intent and scale. This prolific output, in sharp contrast with the man’s reserved nature, strikes us with surprise. We cannot say exactly what Van Gogh might have “told” Caciotti, or what Caciotti believed he could draw from that example; yet it is certain that his work, though chronologically delayed, follows a line parallel to that of the Expressionists. At the same time, he is not unaware of what occurred closer to home with Rosai and Viani, in the sense of a Tuscan assimilation of that artistic message and spirit.
Apart from this inspiration from the great master whose influence bursts forth in his painting, Caciotti’s figurative world remains rooted in a local, familiar setting — yet he strives to expose its tormented and restless soul by breaking its contours and intensifying its colors. This is his way of expressing the tragic essence of our time. His work is therefore marked by a kind of violence, both of inspiration and of image, later tempered in his career by a turn toward neo-futurist fragmentation.
Caciotti — who understood Mannini and the delicacy of his attachment to his native land — moves into another orbit when he paints. He abandons himself to the act of creation, pursuing with vehemence unusual forms and colors. Yet how much humanity emerges — sincere and deeply moving — from the faces of his beggars, and what piercing sorrow emanates from his final Self-Portrait!
Mauro
Pratesi
He holds the chairs of History and Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence
Mario Caciotti is a painter who, without a doubt, would have appealed to Gianni Testori, I believe, for his very human nature as an artist—one who can be placed within that supreme and, in a certain sense, unattainable lineage that, in the critic’s view, united Giacometti, Bacon, and Varlin.
With the latter, Testori maintained, since the early 1960s, a faithful relationship not only of critique but also of deep friendship, recognizing in the Ticinese artist that profound sense of material substance which, indeed, he had never abandoned.
The passion with which Varlin hurled color onto the hemp canvas to create, in an instant, masterpieces—or, just as irretrievably, failed works—had led Testori to say that the artist, through his paintings, had grasped “sublime and atrocious truths.” Varlin’s painting was the result of mixtures and essences of the remnants of all and of no color: “oils, enamel, ducotone, tempera, water, dust,” and finally, to the critic’s delight, “vomit and urine.”
No one, according to Testori, had managed as Varlin did to express the “heart, blood, bones, eyelids, arthritis, and calluses of life.” And, from a social point of view as well, no one had stood so firmly with those who possessed no power—with the “absolute vagabond.”
I do not know whether the great lesson of Varlin, as interpreted through Testori’s essential critical reading, was ever fully absorbed by Mario; however, I believe that a shared spirit binds them, such that the reference to the Ticinese master seems to me more fundamental than the one—commonly and repeatedly put forth by critics, and certainly supported by Mario himself—to the name of Van Gogh.
Caciotti has often stated that his painting is born “in speed,” such that after an hour, “it becomes an eternity, because then one begins to correct.” Thus, like Varlin, Mario either captures the painting immediately in the first strikes of brush and spatula—or loses it forever.
Mario, like a great jazz musician playing without a score but improvising upon a note, upon the wave of his own mood, lets the spectacular triumph of cadmiums, reds, and ultramarine blues vibrate emotionally from his blood. And, like Varlin’s mythical vagabond Wolz, the portraits of Caciotti’s marginalized and neglected characters gain strength—those seen against the superficial success of others who have reached an ephemeral, fleeting prosperity, gratifying only in the immediate hedonism of achievement.
Mario reserves affection and empathy for these figures who remain as social witnesses, traces of a local life otherwise difficult to find—amid the rampant erosion of values, in the province as in the city, among those who view social reality from the height of a roaring SUV or a gleaming sports car.
Mario’s portraits are of men of pure humanity, unlucky or merely marginalized: Giuliano the jester, known for his spontaneous imitations of singer Gianni Morandi; the severe but kind charcoal burner nicknamed Fumicone; Lilli the cobbler; the unfortunate Robertino; Nunzio the farmer; or the irritable and furrow-browed Angelucci.
Names and faces that come alive and take strength in Caciotti’s paintings with impetuous energy, forming a loving and passionate “court of miracles” that seems to have stepped straight out of a popular novel by Vasco Pratolini.
Thus Mario becomes the chronicler of that area between the plains of Sesto and Calenzano, uniting the prosperous and opulent development of industrial warehouses, gigantic pilotis, and modernist-style suburban villas coexisting beside old houses and ancient farmsteads.
Of this plain—now almost mythical, composed of poetic visions in full light but also of murky undercurrents—Marione has always been enamored and fulfilled. Like one of his dear painted animals, he roams happily through these familiar places, among their shadows and ghosts, reluctant to stray far from them; like a gentle creature, he loves to curl back into his den on Via Pratese.
The current exhibition brings together almost sixty years of painting, from his early experiments at the end of the 1930s to his most recent works—about a hundred pieces revealing an absolute love for color, conceived as both form and space, where reality exists because it is the color itself that transfigures and gives it strength.
Critics have often drawn—rightly—connections to Fauvism, to the Brücke group, to the hallucinated humanity of Ensor, the spectral anguish of Munch, and the melancholy of Soutine, as well as to the rough painting of Rosai and Viani.
To these models, Mario alternates his voracious visions from television, and, as an avid viewer, he captures images from late-night pulp films—those that only devoted cinephiles can truly see and appreciate for their hidden qualities. Thus Mario spends many nighttime hours with sketchbook in hand, drawing and gathering precious insights from films such as La figlia di Raja or Rapita, where the protagonist—a gentle killer—reminds him of his own Giuliano, the ingenuous jester of Sesto.
Among the many names that history has passed down to us, many undeniably belong to their places of origin—Mino da Fiesole, Desiderio da Settignano, Benedetto da Maiano. It is therefore not excessive to call him Mario da Calenzano, and it should not appear reductive with respect to any supposed universality, for the artist’s spirit humbly and deeply identifies with the land of his creative search.
In Mario’s case, this identification has found extraordinary vigor in the past twenty years—proof that mature age and old age can yield works of absolute strength and youthful temperament.
In this regard, we might recall the lesson of the great Hokusai, who died at ninety in 1849, and who, at the moment of his death, is said to have exclaimed: “If Heaven had granted me ten more years, or even just five, I would have become a true painter!”
I do not believe Mario ever had the opportunity to study Hokusai, although certain happy echoes might suggest otherwise; yet the spirit and power of his recent painting demonstrate the achievement of an expressiveness that has blossomed precisely at the threshold of old age—a fruit of tireless and determined research by one who, despite his years, has not surrendered to earlier accomplishments.
On the contrary, Caciotti has always believed in poetic inspiration as the vital source of his work, overcoming the narrow confines of artistic categories and generations. And often, through the stunning colors and violent vigor of his imagination, his painting recalls—by analogy—the explorations of younger generations of artists.
Indeed, by no means would Mario’s presence have been out of place in the epoch-making exhibition A New Spirit in Painting (1981), held at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, alongside Rainer Fetting, Dieter Hacker, Karl Heinz Hödicke, Markus Lüpertz, Sigmar Polke, the so-called Neue Wilden (“New Fauves”) of Germany, who, together with Italians like Clemente, Chia, and Paladino, became the protagonists of a fertile season that swept away an obsolete concept of art, reclaiming a return to painting, exalting once again the power of material and color.
Why not Mario as well?
He, too, has always believed in painting—and through his language, has sought to represent the existential and social unrest of his time.
Tommaso
Paloscia
Rome, 10/29/1918 – Florence, 03/28/2005
He was an Italian journalist, art critic, and essayist
A bullfight, a cockfight — the tumultuous interplay of strong, vivid colors becomes the symbol of a violence that Caciotti’s expressionist line emphasizes in his depiction of events where domination is the most evident instigator of spectacle.
Caciotti has never witnessed a bullfight in person, nor has he directly observed the savage clash of roosters, that primitive and cruel “game.” Yet he feels its rhythm, the aggression of its protagonists reaching his imagination through careful and passionate reading, or through whirlwinds of images captured from the mass media and processed somewhere between the unconscious and awareness.
His vision is supported by his methodical, real-life representation of landscapes — the dense woods and wide fields exposed to sun and storm alike — surrounding Sesto Fiorentino, where he lives and works with tireless intensity, in a kind of delirium of color.
That unfulfilled ambition — to stand as both protagonist and judge of a world he wishes to reshape through his restless energy (now unchained and rebellious against any discipline that might restrain his gestures and their complications) — sometimes turns inward along an ancient path, finding release in the self-portrait, a recurrent theme in his art.
Each self-portrait becomes a lucid exercise in introspection, a renewed reflection on the soul’s turmoil. The image struggles within itself, reopening — again and again — the floodgates that unleash the cries of conscience and the passions of feeling.
In this exhibition, Caciotti presents a synthesis of many works painted over the past two years — a difficult selection among countless expressions in which shifting states of mind have inspired at times aggressive interpretations of nature, yet always sustained by a pure, instinctive poetry that even the most violent colors cannot destroy. On the contrary, that poetry shines through — between a vivid red and a burdened cobalt — under the vigilant line that defines structure and form.
These are images that crowd eternally across walls and tables, resisting classification by genre, determined to defy any mental attempt to moderate the language from which they draw their very reason for being.