Large canvas emblematic of the production of the Milanese painter Giancarlo Ossola. Grown up and trained in the difficult years of the Second World War and the post-war period, Ossola attended the evening courses of the Brera Academy and the municipal school of painting of Castello in Milan. Close to Giorgio Gaber and to the world of the Milanese committed song, he found his first artistic inspirations - between the sixties and seventies - on one hand in the informal and on the other in the existential realism.
His informal, however, is not an instinctual use of matter, but rather allows structures, architecture, perspectives, dust and things to emerge, as in the works on display here dating back to the seventies: La stanza stretta (The narrow room) and Studio per la città (Study for the city).
On the other hand, the reality that begins to emerge in his works is not the disruptive, critical and anti-dogmatic one of the painters of existential realism, painters of the suburbs and marginal environments: his figural focus is made up above all of urban interiors of work, laboratories, factories, workers' canteens, abandoned warehouses painted on canvases that enter into an increasingly marked relationship with photography.
Ossola's interiors are the archetypal architectures of his time, places-theaters in which the traces of those who have spent - more or less forced - their lives are accumulated. Temporary domicile therefore represents a place of the human condition of the twentieth century. Significantly, the human figure is latent, but the place is enough to render the sense of fatigue, suffering and precariousness of those who inhabited it.
Legacy of Piero Del Giudice, 2019
