| It is difficult to speak of Cataldi’s painting, especially for one who thinks that the “aesthetic
judgment” must not be merely superstructural, but related to the pathos of the artist, his
feeling, his humanity thereby becoming “structure”, a way of transmitting values and ideas
between the artist and the critic, between the artist, those who view his works, and the social
group. It must, in final analysis, become a vehicle of culture.
But this writer has managed to overcome the obstacle, even if in a relative sense, thanks to
the human contact with the Artist in this period of cultural ferment.
His painting has a profoundly human content which finds clear expression in the artist’s
constant, almost obsessive, concern for the subject of war and hunger, for the silence of the
countryside, for nature, “living” and sparkling with colour: the faces, almost disintegrated,
twisted with pain,.
The gaunt, emaciated figures, to the point of seeming like skeletons roaming about, the
despair of the refugees fleeing the atrocities of war... that is certainly not the manifestation of
a gratuitous taste for the hideous, as if it were a recast of literary Ossianism in literature - a
renewed taste for the macabre.
Quite to the contrary – there are clear and well-defined subjects, and a cultural position, a
basic, living and actual condition directly involving the entire background and the nature itself
of modern civilization. |
