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Solidity of Fog (Solidità della nebbia), 1912
Oil on canvas, 100 x 65 cm
Gianni Mattioli Collection
Long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice |
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Luigi Russolo, to a degree greater than any other of the Futurists, systematically attempted to illustrate in oil paintings the images contained in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (April 1910). The Solidity of Fog evokes several passages from the manifesto. As a night scene, it specifically illustrates the Futurist delight in the electric lighting that permitted a whole new repertoire of visual sensations and experiences in early 20th century cities: the redoubling of life referred to in the manifesto. The subject, in which atmosphere and mood unite a group of disparate individuals, has a literary equivalent in the so-called Unanimist poetry current in Paris, with which Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was familiar.
The painting is structured by concentric rings radiating from two different points that render tangible the physical sensations of a foggy night. The vague form of a horse drawn carriage is perceptible in the distance. The attempt to paint an equivalent for physical sensation is characteristic of Russolo. Earlier works, for example, took perfume and music as their subjects. Such experiments with synaesthesia link Russolo to the Scapigliatura painters of Northern Italy late in the 19th century, whose Romantic conviction was also that pictorial technique could convey atmosphere and mood.
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