Giuseppe Cesetti (1902-1990) - Cavalli e Fantini

AUTHOR

Giuseppe Cesetti (1902-1990) Italian painter. Born in Tuscania, he was one of the most singular protagonists of 20th-century Italian painting. Son of a family of farmers and breeders, he spent his childhood in close contact with the harsh and fascinating nature of the Maremma, an element that would leave an indelible mark on his artistic vocation. Initially self-taught, at only sixteen he left his father’s house to undertake a long study journey between Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice, absorbing the lessons of classical art and forging ties with the greatest intellectuals and artists of his time. Despite humble origins and a training foreign to traditional paths, his undisputed talent soon led him to hold prestigious academic roles: in 1941 he obtained the chair of painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (the city where he was among the initiators of the cultural circle around the Cavallino movement) and later he moved to the Accademia di Roma. A fundamental moment for his European breath was also the stay in Paris between 1935 and 1937, during which he formed a fertile friendship with masters such as Giorgio de Chirico and Filippo de Pisis.

Cesetti’s poetics draw on memory and the mythical transfiguration of his homeland, characteristics that earned him the famous epithet of the "painter of horses" or the "maremmana painter." From a stylistic and technical point of view, the artist favored depictions with a nearly primitive taste and a deliberately naïve flavor. In these works, figures of animals, cowhands, and wide rural horizons lose their purely realistic connotation to become loaded with expressionist valences, exalted by the use of bright chromatisms, textured brushstrokes, and intensely anti-natural colors. This exceptional ability to fuse the candor of rural vision with a deep awareness of the avant-garde made him a highly sought-after author, leading him to exhibit at countless editions of the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadriennale. Today Cesetti’s works enrich numerous prestigious private and historic collections and are housed in important museum institutions, including the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GNAM) in Rome and the renowned Mario Rimoldi Collection of Modern Art in Cortina d’Ampezzo.

DESCRIPTION

"Horses and Jockeys," mixed media on canvas, 59x52 cm with frame, 41x34 cm the canvas alone, signed at the bottom right, datable to the 1970s. On the back, the stamp of Galleria Orler, a historic and important Venetian gallery of modern and contemporary art.

The central subject is a compact group of horses and jockeys, or perhaps Maremman cowhands, captured in a moment of pure and almost convulsed dynamism. The composition is closed and circular, with the figures interwoven and overlapping in a tangle of bodies that fills the center of the scene. The horses are rendered with a black, dark, incisive stroke, incredibly effective at capturing the raw energy of the movement. This gestural immediacy blends with a coloristic brushwork that is one of Cesetti’s hallmarks; the horses are colored with non-realistic but highly emotive and anti-naturalistic tones, a intensely pink horse, a gray one, a bright red-orange, while the jockeys are limited to white jackets and black helmets, almost archetypal. The entire scene is enclosed by a pronounced circular stroke at the bottom, creating a perimeter of action, floating on a watercolor background where blue splashes, grass green, and touches of pink alternate.

The canvas fits perfectly within Cesetti’s mature production and his poetics, rooted in the myth of his homeland, the Maremma, and in the mythical transfiguration of his rural figures. The choice of mixed media, combining the fluidity of watercolor with the dry, tactile mark of charcoal or oil pastels, reflects a formal synthesis that is at once primitivist and deeply aware of the avant-garde. Cesetti does not seek photographic verisimilitude, but a visceral expression; the bold chromatic play transforms the scene into an expressionist icon, where the horse, a symbol of archaic vitality, becomes a pretext to explore color and form in a pure way. His vision, described as “naïve” only apparently, is in fact a cultivated operation of recovering a simple expressive truth, distant from the Academies, capable of capturing the dynamic essence of a bond between man and nature.

CONDITION REPORT

Excellent overall condition. Work intact in every part with vivid and legible color and stroke. The frame is offered as a complement.

The photo of the painting placed in an setting is generated with artificial intelligence and should be considered purely illustrative. Only the remaining photos, which faithfully show the object and its characteristics, both general and detailed, are valid.

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