Description
Domenico Cantatore (Ruvo di Puglia 1906 – Paris 1998) – Odalisque (Homage to Delacroix).
Oil on panel, in gilt wood frame.
Signed lower left: «da DELACROIX CANTATORE».
Autograph inscription on the reverse: «omaggio a Delacroix».
Domenico Cantatore ranks among the leading figures of twentieth-century Italian painting. Trained in Bari and Milan, he eventually settled in Paris, where his figurative research engaged with the great French tradition and with European avant-garde movements. His painting, consistently devoted to an intense, chromatically rich figuration, places him among the postwar Italian masters active on the international scene. The present work is a declared reinterpretation of a Delacroixian subject (as attested by the autograph inscription on the reverse), in which Cantatore translates the theme of the oriental odalisque into his own personal language: broad, vigorous brushwork, emphatic black outlines, and a palette dominated by turquoises, greens, and flesh-toned pinks. The female figure, seated cross-legged in an undefined interior, is rendered with a formal synthesis close to the Fauvist lesson, filtered through the plastic sensibility characteristic of this Apulian master.
Condition report: Good state of conservation of the pictorial surface.
