Towards the end of the 1930s, Goliardo Padova began facing a deep personal crisis. He was progressively marginalised by the artist labour unions during the twenty years of Fascism because of his surname that recalled Jewish origins; he was compelled to join the Italian Army in 1942; after 8th September 1943, he was captured by the Germans and sent to Germany in Karlsruhe’s Camp. He could come back only at the end of the war. Then, he was severely debilitated, deaf in one ear because of a bomb explosion and psychologically hit.
Only after mid-1950s could Padova resume his pictorial activity again, starting with the tempera technique, then oil painting, showing himself up to the public with a personal exhibition in Milan, at the Cairola Gallery. In that occasion he exposed a series of tempera canvases named Bulldozer in the Floodplain Land, which show a particular attention to the works by the river, an environmental sensibility ante-litteram and a pessimistic vision of the bond between nature and modern civilization. From the stylistic point of view, the painter used curved and broken lines that recalled his neo-cubist and neo-futurist experiments in these years.
But the line would soon be replaced by the chromatic matter, an disturbed matter in which the painter relives symbolically his trauma and from which he unleashes his visions.
Acquired through a public subscription in 2016
