Ennio Morlotti (1910 - 1992) Landscape, 1966 Oil on canvas 43 x 70 cm Signature: "Morlotti" on recto Date: '66' on front Distinctive elements: on the verso, labels of Galleria Annunciata, Milan; Galleria d'Arte Sianesi, Milan; Galleria Odyssa, Rome; Banca Popolare di Intra with inventory references; stamps of Galleria d'Arte Mediterranea, Reggio Calabria; Galleria d'Arte Sianesi, Milan Provenance: Galleria d'Arte Annunciata, Milan; Galleria d'Arte Sianesi, Milan; Galleria Odyssa, Rome; Galleria d'Arte Mediterranea, Reggio Calabria; Banca Popolare di Intra; Veneto Banca SpA in LCA Conservation status. Support: 95% Conservation status. Surface: 95% In 1954, Morlotti presented five large figure paintings at the XXVII Venice Biennale, which were later destroyed. They were the announcement of a poetics that affirmed the identity of figure and landscape and painting as involvement, as being in things, which brought him close to the Informal movement: "I was strangely close to the true heroes of my generation, all bent on the adventure of the organic and the living: Gorky, De Staël, Pollock [...]. I could be called informal if one takes into account the coincidence that it established, in painting, with the value of instinct. It seemed to me the revolt of life against beautiful things, against ideas that were too systematic. I felt drawn towards a romantic impulse. I wanted to envelop myself in nature, rather than look at it and paint it from the outside [...]. To achieve my image I did not care about the means. I sank into the material to achieve a clarity of language'. At the height of the dense season of the 1950s, Morlotti shifted his interest to the Ligurian landscape. The encounter is prepared by the internal movements of the artist's language: it takes on that "point of distance" (P.G. Castagnoli) that the previous experience had denied. It is the rediscovery of a dimension of distance from the image after the involvement that characterised the previous work. "I realised that that abundance of colour [...] altered the sense of what I wanted to establish. I wanted and want to achieve my aspirations of organic density [...] but now I try not to let myself be drowned in matter [...]. It is still the sense of the organic that is expressed in those landscapes. In Liguria, I met by chance a beautiful and mysterious undergrowth, different from the nature I saw in Brianza, and I started to paint that mystery'. The recovery of the relationship with a comprehensible nature is documented in the monograph published by the Ente Premi in Rome in 1966, the year of our painting.