Francesco Casorati

Volo su... (Flight over…) by Francesco Casorati is composed of 52 stylised birds represented in four different poses, two in flight and two with their legs visible, distributed in succession along an imaginary zigzag trajectory, while holding in their beaks the same long red thread that from via Garibaldi, the site of the original location, ends up wrapping around the monument to the Caduti del Fréjus (Fallen of the Fréjus tunnel) in piazza Statuto. It is a work that well represents the artist’s poetics, in which the geometric outline of the birds is combined with a fairy-tale intonation and the bright red thread represents a path that unites them and, like Ariadne’s thread, shows passers-by the road to harmony.  

Francesco Casorati (Turin, 1934-2013) was active from the second half of the 1950s among the turinese artists who gathered around Francesco Tabusso’s Orsa Minore magazine, developing his individual journey but in constant dialogue with contemporary artistic currents. The son of Felice, one of the major protagonists of Italian art in the first half of the 20th century, and the English artist Daphne Maugham who had initiated him into painting and the piano, Francesco Casorati, despite his differences, had inherited from his father an approach to painting that did not originate from the impression but from the idea, and that also influenced his rich production of engravings. His imagery is rooted in the world of childhood and is populated by recurring subjects such as birds, fish, cages and ships, often depicted in a style in which simplification and formal rigour are combined with a strong lyricism.  

He participated in the Venice Biennale (in 1956 and 1962) and the Quadriennale in Rome (in 1959 and 1966). Solo exhibitions of Francesco Casorati include: Palazzo Robellini, Acqui Terme (1982); Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara (1985); Palazzo dei Sette, Orvieto (2003); Museo civico d'arte contemporanea di Mombercelli (2004) and Villa Vallero, Rivarolo (2011).  

Silvia Maria Sara Cammarata