oil on canvas, 45×44 cm
signed and dated upper left
- Accounts 1919
Still Life: pear, pineapple and eggs transfers the lyricism of Words in the Wild and the vigor of futurist typeface to objects, taking care to place them in curious isolation, thanks to the deep shadow that surrounds them. Painted in the summer of 1919 in Antignano, when Conti was working together with Pavolini on the magazine “II Centone” and on the drafting of the Manifesto della Pittura Analogica, which will remain unpublished, it is the motive for authoritative discussions between the two friends, in search of new expressive formulas. It is particularly representative of the moment when on Conti’s futurism is deliberately grafted that metaphysical tone that had always winked at it. Deepening the root expressions stands of dechirichian metaphysics itself with a “plebeian” imprint inferred from Campana’s poetry, this juncture has above all the function of awakening Conti’s pictorial instincts and bringing him back to the great lesson of the seventeenth century, which Roberto Longhi was reproposing in these years.
