Lino Perissinotti

The two still lifes were presented at the XX Exhibition of the Bevilacqua La Masa Opera, held in 1929 in Venice, for sale for one thousand lire each. Resident in Piazzola sul Brenta, Perissinotti graduated as a private owner from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1914 and then took part in the Great War and settled in Rome at the end of the conflict, where he made his debut with a solo show in 1920 at the Giosi Gallery.

Back in Veneto, he taught from 1920 to 1923 between Vicenza and Verona, later moving to Ferrara, where he carried out political activity. Refusal to join the Fascist party forced him to resign from teaching in 1926, the same year he was admitted to the Venice Biennale for the first time. On that occasion he exhibited After the Crash (Vicenza, Civic Museum), a work which, while directly recalling Cézanne’s card players, shows the impact of the early culture of the twentieth century group in the need for a return to tradition.

However, adhering to the twentieth century climate was very personal and contradictory (Giorgio Di Genova [1994, p. 887 and 1995, pp. 1419-1420] speaks of “anti-nineteenth century” and “anti-sarfattism”): Perissinotti was an isolated artist by election, who led an autonomous line of development, carrying out careful research on the problems of form as the structure of the painting.

In the Roman years (1933-1936), after abandoning figure painting, he found himself on positions parallel to those of the young opposition artists, approaching Mafai, Pirandello and the other artists of the Roman School in the development of a refined tonal painting which shows an unequivocal sentimental adhesion to the reasons excluded from the rhetoric of the art of the regime.

Through landscape and still life Perissinotti returned to an investigation of the structure that had remained largely extraneous to the figurative culture of the first decades of the century in Italy and, in this regard, his still lifes are among the most significant examples of reading. by Cézanne date in the Bel Paese (see Franco Sborgi and Gianfranco Bruno in Perissinotti 1977).

Giuseppe Pensabene (1934), who highlighted “the sober and constructive color” of his painting and his “love for tight composition”, gave a first precise reading in an anti-naturalistic sense, capturing that abstract and metaphorical intention that brings the Venetian artist in Cagnaccio di San Pietro and some results of “Magic Realism”.