Giuseppe Migneco

Giuseppe Migneco was born in Messina in 1908 and died in Milan in 1997. His painting style emerged in the early 1940s with "long, aggressive brushstrokes, predominantly green, through which threads of chrome yellow vibrate." This free and violent stroke clearly echoes Van Gogh, although Migneco only knew the Dutch master through reproductions. Umberto Silva later identified other influences: "His portrayal of the grotesque, with its moral undertones, aligns more with the developments of Rouault and Soutine, rather than with pure expressionistic masks. It is a grotesque that stigmatizes, as seen in works like Still Life with Masks or The Man with the Bandaged Finger, where every detail plays an allusive and metaphorical role."

The red in the portrait of the man contrasts with the menacing and unusual black of the bandage mentioned in the title, which De Micheli interpreted as a reworking of Levi's Man with the Black Glove. The anxieties and uncertainties that characterize his existence, even physically impairing him (significantly, the bandaged hand is the right one, symbolizing action and painting), are nevertheless tempered by a glimmer of hope. Art historian Elena Pontiggia sees the opposition between red and black as an allegory of the eternal struggle between Eros and Thanatos, where the black bandaged finger alludes to an unconscious phallic symbol. According to Fagone, however, the key to interpretation lies in the flowers offered by the wounded hand: "Perhaps it is a mirror image of the painter, carrying with him bitter sweetness," a metaphor for the role of the painter, but also for the poet who, as Montale put it, wishes he were not asked to speak. For Migneco, a romantic subject can become tragically grotesque, as in the portrait of a couple of lovers, where very few elements actually suggest a romantic relationship. The man appears almost agonizing, his posture unnatural, and even the flowers he must have brought as a gift to his beloved are withered and shriveled.

The park motif, recalled by the original title of the work, Bench in the Park, as listed in the catalog of Migneco's solo exhibition at the Galleria Genova in 1940, is entirely secondary in the composition and is actually distorted by the iron gate that painfully evokes the bars of a prison, rather than the leisurely atmosphere of an afternoon stroll. The feeling of anguish and oppression is amplified by Migneco's compositional choices, where not a single centimeter of the canvas is spared from this kind of horror vacui, with tongues of color taking over the image with their graphic and intricate patterns. Beniamino Joppolo described the operational process of the painter from Messina in these words: "Migneco is instinctively inclined to reduce the world in form and color to chaos, only to reconstruct it in his own new vision of form and color, as if to say that the painter draws inspiration from reality, only to return to it after a painful personal reworking, born from a 'need to free himself'."