A Dispetto Di Noi
Jacopo Casadei

A Dispetto Di Noi (In Spite Of Us)
exhibition by Jacopo Casadei
(curated by and text by Enrico Camprini)
A few years have passed since my first meeting with Jacopo Casadei, in the studio he made out of the small attic of his flat in Cesena. I was at the beginning of a period – which in all honesty I do not know if I could say was really over – in which I was trying, I think with a good dose of naivety, to understand how to position myself in relation to all that painting which literally seemed to surround me with no apparent way out and which, at least quantitatively, today has taken centre stage in Italy and beyond. The naivety lay perhaps in the unconscious urge to think of painting as a monolith, an undifferentiated totality whose historical and cultural weight weighed as much on the individual painting as on my gaze. In other words, as an endeavour where the stakes lay in connecting past and future of the image while forgetting its present; that is, the contradictory nature of its coming to light, the ambivalence between moment and duration, between conception and improvisation, all precipitated into the curious playground delineated by the perimeter of the canvas. The encounter with several artists – Casadei in particular – made me realise the importance of this laboured lightness, in a context apparently dominated by a ‘self-confident’, affirmative painting, often characterised by a figuration that decisively seems to want to declare its belonging to the painting monolith. Paradoxically ironic, this is an exhibition of figures with a privative title: the only possible affirmation is that of the painting’s present, to which we are inevitably second-hand witnesses.
In fact, Casadei’s works manage to show us a form of uncertainty at the very beginning of the act of painting, from which it draws strength; an exercise of freedom that is expressed in acting by trial and error, considering the canvas almost like a notebook from which one does not obtain the synthesis of a discourse but a vision, the germination even sketchy or clumsy of an image. In this sense, A dispetto di noi1 is not only an exhibition of figures – of connoted subjects, we will see later – but above all an exhibition on the figure, on its decisive role in the artist’s research, on its ever-variable, uncertain and inconstant appearance. This is therefore the common line of the works we have selected, without disentangling ourselves in accessory narratives. The only somewhat narrative continuity can be found precisely in the choice of subjects, here as elsewhere drawn from a popular imagery and at the same time linked to the context of human and territorial relations that characterise Casadei’s biography. “Provincial lyricism” 2, A formula recently used about his painting seems perfect to me: this is where we should start, from a poetic and viscerally elegant sincerity capable of expressing with clarity a synthesis of the particular and the universal, the local and the cosmopolitan.
The eight paintings presented here belong to two small series dedicated to subjects that are not at all related: a group of rather bizarre felines and Carlos Valderrama, the iconic Colombian national football player of the 1980s and 1990s. That cats and footballers are rather popular images is not in doubt, but their presence in Casadei’s work is due to stimuli linked to something else entirely. The first stems from an encounter with a little girl – Jacopo is an educator in a primary school – who is used to drawing felines as a means of expressing her moods; Valderrama, on the other hand, represents a memory of the legendary Italia ‘90 World Cup, but above all of a territorial and cultural context. At that time, Jacopo tells me, he often met at the village bar – an elective place, repository of millenary truths – a gentleman with thick hair vaguely resembling that of the footballer and therefore greeted by everyone with ‘Ué, Valderàma!’, obviously exclaimed in a decisive Romagna cadence. These are certainly trivial anecdotes; we can do without this information when we stand in front of the painting trying to grasp its present, that is to say, its procedural and apparently unresolved nature. Yet, I believe it is precisely the anecdotal, everyday and sometimes trivial origins of the subjects in question that make them effective pretexts for painting. Devoid of narrative function, of the pretence of justifying their presence on canvas, they have in their own way become universals; honest icons of a provincial lyricism, of a punk painting with jazz interludes.
The five canvases that run around the perimeter of the exhibition space mark out a sequence of figures that are rather different from each other on a pictorial level, but which share a similar compositional approach. These portraits of felines, some in a sketchy three-quarter cut, are presented as a bizarre series of imaginary characters about which the viewer is certainly prompted to fantasise, but above all they propose a variation – the umpteenth in Casadei’s career – on the theme of the relationship between figure and background. The key to the unravelling of this relationship on the painting surface is drawing; or rather the fertile conflict, never really resolved, between drawing and painting. In many of the artist’s works over the years, a status quo seemed to be maintained, a delicate balance of free but sufficiently allusive signs and backgrounds, a balance that I often thought was on the verge of breaking down. The feline portraits represent the deflagration that I suspected: the decisive emergence of the figure in the background, without, however, reducing the role of drawing in any way. It can become a functional element, tracing the silhouette of a white cat that seems to walk over the cornice of a wall (L’ouvertoure du chat blanc, 2024). It can become erasure, almost blinding a burly but very unthreatening looking cat in a vest (Stringo star, 2023). It can, in a painting, be a metaphor for the very conflict that fuels the artist’s practice, sharply defining a muscular figure with a feline head in the upper portion of the canvas, and then negating it by drawing marks (or letters?) in the lower one (Gela è in Siberia!, 2023).
“These felines have those muscles that only an eight-year-old can express, those metaphorical muscles that go straight to an adult’s stomach without leaving him the chance to dodge the blow. Mine is an attempt to pull out the muscles as they do”. Thus, in an e-mail months ago, Jacopo told me about the genesis of this series. After all, it is clear that the artist has put his painting style to the test by playing his hand, looking for a decidedly more ‘muscular’ painting than usual. It is, however, an attempt that is entirely in line with his practice; undisciplined, instinctive and at the same time reflective, with erasures and repentances dotting the figure, revealing what I called above the present of the painting.
I recently happened to talk to Jacopo about Vasco Bendini, a great artist in his own provincial way, for whom we both have a soft spot. Paolo Fossati has written important pages on him3, insisting on his nature as a painter intrinsically linked to the figure, even in the Informal period. Perhaps there is no way to truly abandon it, even when it seems to disappear from the perimeter of the painting. That disappearance and appearance are sides of the same coin? Many of Casadei’s works, such as the three paintings in the series on Valderrama, suggest so. The delicacy that the other paintings vigorously attempt to oppose returns here, only now the subject has a name and a surname. Yet, we barely see it, only hinted at or sketched; drawn like a hasty note in a sky above the green patterns of a playground (Dieci, 2020); through the moustache, eyes and mouth alone, which juxtaposed against a coloured background give shape to the footballer’s head and beard (Colombia Pictures, 2024), and also reminiscent of a philosopher not so despised in Romagna where Jacopo and I come from. We will call him Carlos Marx.
1 An Italian translation of the title of one of the exhibited works, it gives metaphorical voice to the paintings themselves as if declaring their provisional state.
2 L. Bertolo, Gli ospiti improvvisi di Jacopo Casadei o del lirismo provinciale, in Ex5, exhibition catalogue edited by C. Lorenzetti, NFC editions, Rimini, 2023
3 P. Fossati, A note for Bendini, in S. Pegoraro (ed.), Vasco Bendini. La ballata dei dieci cieli, Bologna, 1996.