Giuseppe Biasi and Filippo Figari

In a Sardinia that, in the aftermath of the First World War, will see the problem of regional autonomy dramatically re-explode in the context of the situation of conflict no longer of peoples but of classes, destined to lead Italy to the fascist regime, the painters Giuseppe Biasi and Filippo Figari will respond to the needs of constructing identity with figuratively different options, but united by the substantial adherence to an attitude aimed at transfiguring the complex reality of the island in terms of sublimation into myth.

Giuseppe Biasi will link his name to the illustrations for Grazia Deledda's narrative, starting in the twenties towards the production of easel works, increasingly characterized by the fairytale transliteration of the Sardinian “popular”, with all the reassuring evidence compared to the modest needs of a private client, not only local in scope, to the point of crowning his personal choice of escape with his stay in Africa (1924-27), after which he dedicated himself to painting works that were undoubtedly fascinating but hopelessly confined to an exotic taste that is not politically correct, when the national artistic scene will be dominated by the plastic trends of regime classicism.

Filippo Figari, on the other hand, will be able to monopolize the public client, creating one after the other the great cycles for the Civic Palace and other public buildings in Cagliari, up to the threshold of the thirties, and also linking his choices and his production to the icons celebrating a figurative vision and an anti-historical feeling, which is already configured in terms of wandering around a “primitive” environment - that of rural as opposed to modern Sardinia - qualified as archaic when he draws on the dimension dimension environment suspended from the timeless event, deceptively immobile in an island and national socio-cultural framework in which, in reality, many things were rapidly changing.

MONOGRAPHS
G. Altea, Giuseppe Biasi. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2004 (The Masters of Sardinian Art; 1);
G. Murtas, Filippo Figari. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2004 (The Masters of Sardinian Art; 2).

Update

25/9/2023 - 16:17