Self-portrait

This artwork, oil on cardboard, is the self-portrait made in 1927 by Arrigo del Rigo. The latter was an artist of the group known as "Scuola di Prato", attended by young people from working-class backgrounds and convinced anti-fascists who aspired to a living, modern art based on tradition.
Their training was not the same. While some students attended the Leonardo School of Arts and Crafts in Prato, Arrigo del Rigo attended the Porta Romana Institute of Art in Florence. In the very short 24 years of his life, which tragically ended in 1932 with an alleged suicide disguised as a fatal accident, he was able to lay the foundations for an informed and refined art.
The painter is depicted with a beret on his head and eyes with an elongated cut, fixed in a concentrated and decisive expression. The facial features are almost edgy, unrealistic. As a matter of fact, the division of light marks the various planes in an extreme and synthetic geometric rigor, with results that are similar to European postcubism. This work draws on the Tuscan primitives and the early Renaissance, drawing inspiration from art from Giotto to Masaccio, but also shows influences from Paul Cézanne and Carlo Carrà.
His works highlight two different registers in the interpretation of reality: a more realistic and lyrical one, adopted in landscapes, and a more plastic and synthetic one, apparently more archaic, especially in portraits. As a result, he internalized the image, filtered reality through memory and feeling, and returned it in an anticlassical, synthetic, and popular manner.