Ernesto Treccani

Ernesto Treccani was born in Milan in 1920, where he passed away in 2009. At the age of twenty, he painted the Yellow Self-Portrait, which is part of the Iannaccone collection, and it is likely his very first experience as a painter, as he only began painting after the forced closure of the magazine "Corrente," which had been founded just two years earlier with the financial support of his father. The artist's youth is evident not only in his still adolescent features but also in his simultaneously intense and shy gaze. Treccani uses a few details to narrate himself: the shirt, disheveled and only roughly sketched, the half-open mouth, the tousled curl that invades his forehead, and the eyes, reflective yet untroubled. The background is also devoid of details and lacks any contextual suggestion. This period also produced the Portrait of Beniamino Joppolo, in which Treccani focuses on the large eyes and the contemplative curve of the lips. “He well understands that to comprehend a figure, one must understand how this human being lives, what drives them, and what their interests are,” wrote Raffaele De Grada. For this reason, the artist seeks to convey the subject's thoughts and psychology, omitting contextual indications to focus attention on the face. From a painterly perspective, Treccani demonstrates that, just a year after the Self-Portrait, he had abandoned the Van Gogh influences of his early days, opting for a less tentative brushstroke and a more plastic and compact application of paint. These were also years when a subtle air of change permeated among the painters of Corrente. The lyrical and neoromantic motivation of the beginnings remained, but some stylistic references shifted. “So much so that previously we only spoke of Van Gogh, and afterwards, mainly of Picasso,” Treccani himself commented. The paintings became populated with symbolic images through which to narrate what had become impossible to express after the magazine's closure. “Such emblematic quality was partly due to our residues of hermeticism and partly to the impossibility of expressing oneself clearly in the political condition we were in.” In this sense, it is significant that a painting with the same subject, The Killed Doves from a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, was simultaneously created by both Treccani and Cassinari. This pair of lifeless doves thus becomes an emblem of betrayed innocence, recounting political murders and the climate of gratuitous violence that spread with the regime and the conflict.