Giuseppe Cavalli

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ject has no importance in art, since light and poetry are its permanent subjects.
Giuseppe Cavalli’s still lifes are truly remarkable. In them he succeeds in bringing to ordinary, everyday objects
such as funnels, gloves and the like, a compelling lyrical quality that goes well beyond the simplicity of the things
depicted. It is these images of his that are closest to the abstract or metaphysical artistic themes of his time. The
same well-organized forms and beautiful almost abstract composition between the metaphysical and symbolic, are
to be found also in his views with landscapes and seascapes. They are images of cities, but mostly of nature and the
countryside, from his native Puglia to the Marches region. In fact, Cavalli settled in Senigallia in the Marche in 1939,
after spending a long period in Rome with his family, and frequenting the Milanese cultural milieu in which La
Bussola was formed. The quiet landscape of the Marche and the sea at Senigallia with its long straight coastline,
thus provided the inspiration for his creations, and it was here that he established, with Mario Giacomelli, the Misa
photographic association, which forged many of the new talents who appeared on the Italian photographic scene in
the Fifties.
These views were also the figurative means through which Giuseppe Cavalli expressed his photographic poetics,
as he did in his still lifes. In art the subject has no importance, the important thing is to succeed in depicting the
essence and spirit of things also through unassuming, everyday images.
It is as if the objects, scenery, architecture and even the people photographed by him were extrapolated, as if by
magic, from the common reality and objectiveness that derives from being in a specific place when the photograph
was taken, into the world of imagination or, better, of art. Cavalli himself helps viewers to follow this transition with
his evocative titles: Shadows on a Face, Spring Games, Mystery of the River, Geometry. Titles that are far from literal
and do much more than simply describe what is depicted in these photographs: respectively a boy’s face, a tiny
group of people on a vast beach, a stretch of river and a long railing. Through their simplicity and pureness they
speak a universal language.
Much has been said about the affinity between Cavalli’s photographs and the world of painting, with which he
was familiar also through the experiences of his brothers Emanuele and Pasquale. In the course of his career spanning
over a quarter of a century, he drew his inspiration from many twentieth-century painting movements, from
Metaphysical Painting to Surrealism and Abstractionism. But his work cannot be confined to any one of these, its
only constant being the bright high-key quality with tones verging on white.
Unlike a painter who creates the subjects of his paintings, Cavalli communicates with us through the subjects at
hand or those he seeks out. Thus, like all great photographers, he was able to ‘seize the moment’ if an image or shot
was meaningful enough, or to wait at length, with the patience of a hunter – or rather fisherman, considering his
love for the sea – until the light reached the desired intensity, a sail in the middle of the sea arrived at the right point
or a gust of wind bent the branch of a tree in a particular way, so that things, people and nature came together to
create the desired composition.