Casalmaggiore II is the painting that the German artist Peter Casagrande dedicated to the city in 2002 at the end of his “work in progress” experience in the “Ridotto” of the local theater culminated with an exhibition in the Auditorium Santa Croce organized by the local delegacy of the “Friends of Palazzo Te Association”.
The painting, owned by the Museum, characterized by a thick red zest that hardly let the other colors glimpse through, is a second version of the bigger homonym painting realized by the author for an happening in Casalmaggiore of which we only have video evidence.
This painting by Casagrande, and the history of his making-of, propose again the features that characterized the gestural stream of the European Informal or the abstract American Expressionism (known as Action Painting), although years after their first appearance during the 1950s. These features were: the instinctual freedom of the artistic gesture, the creative fury through which the painter manifests his personality, the improvisation that overtakes each and every planned hypothesis, the substance, the colour and the sign that are no longer expressive media to represent reality, but rather they become the protagonists of the artistic work.
In this room, other paintings that follow the neo-informal language are the ones by Giancarlo Bargoni, Luiso Sturla or the pottery by Sandro Cherchi and Francesco Vitale: the strong chromatic component that characterizes these works, sometimes more lyrical and tidy, sometimes more vigorous and tormented, is an example of how these artists make explicit their conflicting emotions.
Donated by the Artist, 2002
