Born in Nice in 1879, Carlo Corsi completed his classical studies and enrolled in the faculty of engineering. In this period he frequented the Civic Art Gallery where, attracted by the Emilian painting of the seventeenth century, he ventured into a patient work as a copyist. Encouraged by the Bolognese painter A. Scorzoni, his first teacher, he soon abandoned the university to devote himself exclusively to painting and in 1901 was among the exhibitors of the Francesco Francia Society. In 1902 he moved to Turin where he attended courses at the Albertina Academy; he frequented the studio of the painter Giacomo Grosso. Since his first production, the artist has been inspired by subjects of everyday and bourgeois life defined each time as "the Frenchman of Bologna" and "the poet of color", due to his close relationship with Impressionist and French painting. post-impressionist, but also for the consonance with Parisian Italian artists by adoption, such as Boldini, De Nittis and Zandomeneghi. The woman is the protagonist of his works, now portrayed inside a room on a sofa or behind a curtain, now outdoors in a garden or on the beach. Treated with a language alien to any naturalistic reference, all based on color and light effects, from time to time the artist proposes new solutions and coloristic inventions, different aspects of a unitary research which, starting from the natural datum, lyrically transfigures it. in pictorial image, until reaching abstract formulations. Carlo Corsi in 1912 was invited for the first time to the Venice Biennale. His painting had now come to a complete elaboration. The needs for artistic renewal were intuitively addressed in the sense of adherence to a "natural" painting, which drew on the coloristic tradition of the Venetians and the Spanish up to impressionism and post-impressionism. He participates in the exhibitions of the Roman Secession from 1913 to 1916, sharing the climate of reaction to official culture, including at the Venice Biennale (1914) and at the Italian Art Exhibition in San Francisco (1915). In 1914 a new way was given in the artist's research: female images, interior or holiday scenes are rendered making the most of the expressive potential of color with rapid brushstrokes, according to ways of more direct Matissian influence, his attention in fact it goes mostly to the female figure, taken in the most disparate poses, in bourgeois interiors, outdoors, dressed in the most fashionable clothes or naked, intent on reading or walking. However, there is also room for small seascapes, where the most beautiful and renowned seaside resorts in Italy dominate, from Riccione to Cesenatico, from Portofino to Celle Ligure, to conclude with some collages from the 1940s and 1950s. In 1941 he won the Bergamo prize. In addition to the aforementioned exhibitions, particular mention should be made of the participations in the Munich International Exhibition in 1913, in the Venice Biennials in 1920, 1922 and 1924, in the Florentine Spring in 1921, in the First Roman Biennale in 1921, in the Roman Quadrennial in 1941, 1955-56. , 1959-60; among the posthumous exhibitions we recall the presence at the Florentine exhibition "Modern Art in Italy 1915-1935" of 1967. And it happens that the typical sense of color of painters' painting "after impressionism" takes on a new variation in our artist, therefore the profound, and sometimes exotic, sensitivity tends to be stripped down, therefore to match the pure vibrations of light, that is, with its most abstract essence; in a game of contrasts, between splendor and opacity, between dazzling truths and shadows that reabsorb them, which establishes a rare and fascinating balance between natural object and object of fantasy, between things said and things not said, and gives every painting I ran a timbre that cannot be confused: in the exaltation, Valsecchi said of the internal vision, without the last trace of reality being dispersed, even when, in the Collages series, the artist "vows to the devil", as he written by Herta Wescher on Art d'Aujourd'hui, “pouring into it all his spirit of revolt, all his prodigious irony and all his freedom with respect to the means of expression” (Luigi Carluccio). The story of Carlo Corsi was and is today exemplary in this sense. We no longer discuss the quality of the artist's career, whose long life (he was born in 1879 in Nice and died in Bologna in 1966) was totally dedicated to painting and to participate as an intellectual and connoisseur in the national artistic debate, for an epochal span of seventy years. However, it is still necessary to discuss and deepen this individual history, since it contains elements of absolute validity, partly underestimated. The specific quality of Corsi's pictorial style, well known and loved for some youthful traits of post-impressionist derivation, is still less known today for other very evident "experiments". Not only that, thanks to the long existential parable, his art interacts critically and individually with the development of Italian art, in a profound connection with life itself and the historical events of our country, which reverberate in the personal events of the artist and in the expressive variants of his work, traits that make the study of this author a reason for reflection and comparison in an Italian and European panorama.
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