Guido Pajetta (1898-1987) - La madre brutta e il figlio

Important oil on canvas from 1961, belonging to the height of Guido Pajetta's expressive maturity.

The work depicts a mother and a child in an intense and dramatic vertical composition. The figures, deliberately deformed and traversed by a nervous and material gestural painting, emerge from a fragmented and vibrant background.

The brushwork is thick, hefty, almost sculptural. The faces are built through color overlays – bright yellows, ferric reds, muddy greens – that create emotional tension and psychological depth.

The subject is not narrative but emotional: the mother–child relationship is rendered in an expressionist key, with a primitive and aching force typical of Pajetta's production in the 1960s.

An important work by Guido Paolo Pajetta, an artist of great significance who entered the history of art among the great Italian painters of the 20th century.

Pajetta's painterly gesture, sometimes light and swift, other times abrasive and marked, constantly changes. Tormented by his own obsessions, the artist relies on the image as a kind of disguise or alter ego.

Guido Pajetta knew how to employ many languages according to his aim of inner analysis.

He remained, until the end, an artist driven by impulses that led him to address motifs—sometimes dramatic—generated by authentic emotions and experiences because they were the fruit of his passions and his anxieties.

Title: The Ugly Mother and Son - Figures
Dimensions: 45 x 90 cm
Year: 1961
Work archived and accompanied by authentication.
Archive code: 2902
Work registered at the Giorgio Pajetta Archive.
Work not framed.
Canvas mounted on a stretcher.