Dark Period — Angelo Marchetti's Dark Works

Oil painting "The Ascending Soul" by Angelo Marchetti (Cat. 1326), 1969, Opere Nere series: a luminous figure rising as red hands hold it back from the material body.

"Untitled"
Oil on canvas, 1969, 100x70 cm (Cat.1326)

Oil painting "Untitled" by Angelo Marchetti (archive nK03), Opere Nere series: a contorted, arched human figure with clawed hands against a dark ground of blacks and reds.

"Untitled"
Oil on canvas (?), dimensions not recorded, undated
Archive photograph nK03

This work is documented by an archive photograph. For this reason some data have not been directly recorded: the dimensions are not available, the technique -oil on canvas- is given as probable, and the date, when not ascertained, is reported as n.d. (no date). These indications follow the archive's cataloguing criteria and will be updated should new elements emerge.

Oil painting "Untitled" by Angelo Marchetti (Cat. 1340), 1969, Opere Nere series

Read the critical note

"Untitled"
Oil on canvas, 1969, 100x70 cm (Cat.1340)

In this 1969 canvas Angelo Marchetti brings to full maturity the tension that runs through the entire Opere Nere cycle: the conflict between matter and spirit, between earthly weight and the vertical aspiration towards light. The composition is organized along an ascending diagonal that rises from the dense, earthy lower zone — traversed by oxidized browns, dark reds and sudden green flares — towards the upper area, where a pale, almost spectral figure seems to break free from the mass and reach out towards a sky of warm light.

The lower part of the canvas is a magma of telluric forms: roots, flames, vegetal and mineral profiles that merge into an organic clot from which, on the right-hand side, a latent face emerges to observe the viewer. From this dense mass the whitish figure rises with a gesture that evokes at once flight, metamorphosis and combustion; behind it, the dark profiles of the mountains act as a threshold between the earthly world and that of the spirit.

The work translates into image the inner search that contemporary critics had grasped precisely: man's effort to free himself from the weight of matter and recover the pure spirit from which he was born. Surreal in invention and metaphysical in structure, the painting does not illustrate a narrative but fixes a condition: the suspended moment in which form takes leave of matter.