Enchantments of Callicrates (1929) (1929)

Signed lower right: “Marasco”; on the back: label from the Galleria Fonte d’Abisso and the 2nd Prize Terni.
Provenance:
Exhibitions: Paris, Peintres Futuristes Italiens, 1929; Florence, Mostra Interprovinciale Fascista di Belle Arti, 1930; Florence, Mostra Pittura e Scultura Aerofuturista, 1931.
Bibliography: Peintres Futuristes Italiens, exhibition catalogue (Paris, Galerie 23, December – January 1930), no. 65; IV Mostra Interprovinciale Fascista di Belle Arti, exhibition catalogue, Florence, 1930, p. 61, no. 9; Pittura Scultura Aeropittura futurista, exhibition catalogue (Galleria d’Arte Firenze, February 1931), no. 47; Marasco. Anni Dieci – Settanta dal futurismo al concretismo, exhibition catalogue edited by E. Crispolti, T. Sicoli (Rende 1995), Milan, Mazzotta 1995, p. 30; Futurismo e meridione, exhibition catalogue edited by E. Crispolti (Naples, Palazzo Reale, 1996), Electa, Naples 1996, p. 290.

One of the most passionate, provocative and innovative futurists of the Italian avant-garde season, described as a “companion of miracles”[1] by Umberto Boccioni, Antonio Marasco had a symbiotic relationship with Futurism: “rather a fatal, total and exclusive encounter, made up of passion and dedication, almost a kind of mark to be carried throughout life”[2].

Linked to the Florentine fringe of Futurism, and therefore to the cultural environment that gravitated around the magazine Lacerba, he was one of the artists who, between the 1910s and 1920s, enjoyed the most artistic and cultural exchange with the European avant-garde. His first trip to Russia, when he came into contact with artists such as Majakovskij, Malevich, Tatlin and Larionov, took place in 1914, alongside Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who wrote about him several years later: “I admire him as one of the greatest artists of Futurism […] a powerful designer of dynamic forms. […] From this point of view, The Wings of Saint Martin, Velevento, The Enchantments of Callicrates… amazed and continue to amaze”[3]. In the preface to the catalogue of the ‘Futurist Exhibition in Florence’ in 1931, Marinetti praised Marasco’s work, focusing on several paintings, including Enchantments of Callicrates, a key work from 1929 that marked the artist’s arrival at Abstract Art, characterised by an essential and personal vision, intimately idealised, based on Constructivism.

While throughout the 1910s and part of the 1920s his painting had been characterised by a “deconstruction” of reality, by the interpenetration of signs and volumes, by figures, objects and spaces subjected to fragmentation and then recomposed through harsh and vibrant colours and multiple and oblique perspectives, with the transition to the new decade, Marasco’s language converted to light spatiality, to the abstract synthesis of plastic and geometric conformations. Through a schematic process in which signs, lines, shapes and colours are arranged on clear, two-dimensional and airy backgrounds, the painter created a lyrical and rhythmic combination of colours, annotations, and fluctuating and poetic structures. In Enchantments of Callicrates, a work exhibited repeatedly in Italy and Europe between 1930 and 1931, which marks the moment of his greatest recognition on the international Futurist scene, “the torment of the author of the Parthenon is expressed pictorially […]. Marasco, like those venerable Greeks, is serene, geometric, speculative, aware that every line and every mark must have, as it does, a purely pictorial meaning, so that the transposition of Callicrates’ inner torment, rather than obeying calculations, seems and is rather a return to the study of lines in objects as nature presents them to us.

In short, he dynamically reconstructs worlds with a new spirit, employing not the dexterity of a juggler but a deeply thoughtful activity”[4]. As in his work Geometric Equivalents, Marasco also exalts the aesthetics of the machine through pictorial invention in Enchantments of Callicrates: levers, measurements, models and projections that have always fascinated avant-garde artists, according to whom the machine magnifies man and helps to multiply and perfect his actions. But this painting, rather than embodying speed and dynamism, becomes a veritable manifesto of the mechanical spirit, as well as an allegory of technology. It is a clear evocation of De Stijl’s plastic constructivism, which brings the author closer to the abstract artists of the Bauhaus, for whom the machine is “the soul of this century”.

The constructivist analysis of space, architecture, new media and industrial techniques was in fact at the centre of Marasco’s artistic research in the early 1920s, particularly during his stay in Berlin. Together with Enrico Prampolini, he was part of the Novembergruppe, an association of artists and architects, including Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky, from whom Marasco absorbed the analytical aspects of drawing, the essentiality of forms, the symbiosis of art and technology, as well as the emotional effects of colour. In Enchantments of Callicrates, a “neo-metaphysical” dimension also opens up – it is clear that the figure on the left is a synthesis between the man in Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and the mannequin in De Chirico’s Disquieting Muses[5], therefore a symbol of humanity that identifies with dreamlike technical innovation. Marasco transforms the architectural project into an abstract composition, “a kind of mysticism, of formal transcendence […] where the calculation applied imaginatively to forms becomes, for that very reason, a vision from above, transfiguring things and geometric symbols, the designs or construction projects of the famous Athenian, with Ictinus and Phidias, builder of the Parthenon”^[6]. On the one hand, the mysticism of Johannes Itten seems to emerge, anticipating the Italian abstractionism of Rho and Radice, and on the other, the technological culture of Moholy-Nagy. It is no coincidence that Marasco is the forerunner of environmental art and the new culture of light, the author of anti-exhibitions, urban performances in which luminous paintings are mounted on the roofs of houses to go “beyond the solemn, the gloomy and the muffled” [7] of museum halls.

[1] U. Boccioni, Compagno di miracoli, in “La tribuna illustrata”, December 27, 1959

[2] C. De Michelis, L’avanguardia trasversale. Il futurismo italiano in Russia, Bari, De Donato 1973, p. 33.

[3] F.T. Marinetti, Mostra Futurista, preface to the catalogue of the exhibition, Florence, February 1931, p.n.n.

[4] R. Marchi, Isola Oceanica di Marasco, in “Supremazia futurista”, XI, 1933, p. n. n.

[5] T. Sicoli, Antonio Marasco testimone del Futurismo, in Marasco. Anni Dieci – Settanta dal futurismo al concretismo, exhibition catalogue curated by E. Crispolti, T. Sicoli (Rende 1995), Milan, Mazzotta 1995, p. 30.

[6] E. Palmieri, Marasco alla Quadriennale, in “Oggi e domani”, May 23, 1931.

[7] Silvio Mix, Antonio Marasco. L’atelier d’arte decorativa, in “Energie Futuriste”, October 1924, p. 2.

Elena Lago