Xavier Bueno - Boy, 1966

Features

Artist:  Xavier Bueno (1915-1979)

Artwork title:  Ragazzo

Age:  Contemporary

Subject:  Human Figures

Artistic technique:  Painting

Technical specification:  Oil on Canvas

Description : Ragazzo

Oil on canvas cardboard. Signed lower left. Further signature, date and title on the back. After his childhood spent in Spain, his native country, Geneva and Paris, in 1940 Xavier Bueno moved to Italy, in Fiesole, where he joined the group of "Modern Painters of Reality" with his brother Antonio, Pietro Annigoni and Gregorio Sciltian. , whose manifesto proposed an "objective" observation of the truth, of nature and its faithful reproduction as possible. The experience of the Spanish civil war first and then the Italian one increasingly directed the artist towards a realism linked to reasons of strong social content. 1953 represented an important turning point for Xavier's career: it was the year of his explicit adherence to the poetics of socialist realism, an adhesion that came after a personal itinerary that saw him practicing "committed" painting since the pre-war period, with a clear advance on art of the Italian left. Another fundamental stage in Xavier's career was the trip to Brazil in 1954: the artist returned from this experience full of enthusiasm and with a series of inks whose main protagonists are children, teenagers, laborers. From this moment on, the theme of childhood became more and more recurrent, little by little the characters were depicted motionless, in a sort of unreal fog, devoid of even depth, of perspective rigor, in which they emerge as evoked. The work presented here belongs to this production. Between 1959 and 1964 Xavier created the cycle of "Children", suffering images and melancholy symbolic works of a humiliated and oppressed humanity, which the artist presented at the "España libre" exhibition. His technique also underwent an evolution, which led him to seek a thickening of the material, thickened by the addition of sand to the paint; the use of collage, already experimented by him in still lifes, became conspicuous also in the figurative-portraiture field. The material of his paintings became such as to come to define them "fresco on canvas". Work presented in frame.

Product Condition:
Product in very good condition which may show slight traces of wear; it may have undergone restoration work carried out by an expert.

Frame Size (cm):
Height: 57,5
Width: 47,5
Depth: 4

Artwork dimensions (cm):
Height: 40
Width: 30