Oil on canvas applied to cardboard, 62×51 cm
signed and dated upper left U. Conti 1914
Created soon after Conti’s encounter with futurism at the 1913 Florentine exhibition, this still life is a miracle of balance between innuovation and tradition, an example of the innate sense of perfection and mastery of one’s own means that sustain Conti’s path.
The detail of the newspaper poking out behind the glass, the poised spoon, the shadow of the bottle, everything appears crystalline, stereometric and immaterial; each touch is as if suspended in air, but sharply imprinted in our eye, so much so that it awakens an all-intellectual pleasure in the contest that sight establishes with the air, penetrating the invisible.