Lands

With this painting, Sergio Scatizzi closes the cycle of the Volterranian lands, on which he had begin working in 1956, continuing more intensely from 1961, and exhibiting them for the first time in his solo exhibition at the “L’Indiano” Gallery in Florence in 1962. With this series of paintings, inspired by the clay landscapes of the countryside in Volterra in Tuscany, Scatizzi participated in the poetics of European Informalism in his own very personal way. The hills and characteristic dips and rises of the Volterranian landscape, divided between the green tones of grass and the golden glints of wheat and broom, are put together within the painting in a spatial layout reminiscent of the finest Tuscan Renaissance tradition. However, the way the pictorial materials are handled, applied in thick layers of colour, and the intrinsically informal gestuality, expressed by broad, long brush strokes which structure the surface, bring Scatizzi’s painting on a par with the works of the most innovative international painters, from Franz Kline to Nicolas de Stäel.

Landscape, combined with still life, was one of the themes favoured by the artist who, with his painting, investigated the passing of the various seasons. By transferring onto the canvas the memories of visions and feelings that the encounter with nature brought out in Scatizzi, over time the artist composed a veritable existential diary. This approach was fuelled, throughout the 1960s, by the verses written by his writer and poet friends, Giovanni Comisso, Carlo Betocchi and Alfonso Gatto, in a continuous counterpoint of literary and pictorial texts.

The painting was donated by the author to the Modern Art Gallery of Palazzo Pitti in 1998.