Mario Comensoli | |
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| Born | 15 April 1922 Lugano |
| Died | 2 June 1993 (aged 71) Zurich |
| Nationality | Swiss |
| Occupation | Painter |
| Known for | Realist movement |
Mario Pasquale Comensoli (15 April 1922 – 2 June 1993) was a Swiss painter. He is considered as leading figure of the realist movement, depicting the social evolution of post-World War II Switzerland with key themes ranging from Italian immigrants to the 1968 social unrest, the Disco years and the hopelessness of the 'No Future' youth.
Mario Comensoli was born into an Italian immigrant family and grew up in Molino Nuovo. After leaving school, he scraped a living by taking on odd jobs and selling portrait and landscape paintings to tourists. In 1943, when the Municipal Museum of Art (Museo civico di belle arti) in Lugano acquired his landscape painting Piccolo Paesaggio, Comensoli obtained a scholarship from the Fondazione Torricelli, which enabled him to attend classes at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts and lectures at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. In 1944 he met his future wife, Hélène Frei, who died in 1994, and the two married in Basela year later. During his stays in Paris Comensoli became acquainted with Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and the brothers Alberto Giacometti and Diego Giacometti.
In 1953 Mario Comensoli was invited by the Zurich Art Society to exhibit 65 works of art at Zurich’s Helmhaus Museum. The oil paintings, drawings and sculptures essentially summarised his experiences gathered in Paris. Although critics appreciated his post-Cubist works, Comensoli changed his artistic style following a polemical attack in the Parisian weekly newspaper Les lettres françaises and under the influence of some left-wing intellectuals. This gave rise to Comensoli's pictorial cycle Lavoratori in blu (Workers in blue), a series of oil paintings that consistently focused on craftsmen from the south who had immigrated to Switzerland in the 1950s in search of work, whom the painter depicted in blue working clothes and in everyday situations.
Encouraged by the writers Carlo Levi and Saverio Strati, Comensoli took his paintings to Rome. At the "Galleria San Luca" he encountered Renato Guttuso, a painter and master of Italian socialist realism with whom he had a heated discussion. Guttuso criticised him for his lack of political vision and the little elegiac nature of his characters. However, Comensoli did not seek to be a political painter. His intention was rather to show the poetry in the marginalised figures of society, who for him represented the new aesthetic. In 1970, Italian immigrants in Switzerland awarded him with the "Nicolao della Flüe" prize for the solidarity aspects of his work, an honour he shared with Max Frisch and the director Alexander Seiler. In these years, Comensoli's painting, while remaining strictly figurative and indifferent to the artistic imperatives of the "Constructivists" dominating the Zurich scene, dealt with the characteristic topics of the 1968 protests, incorporating the stylistic influences of Pop Art.
The last change in Mario Comensoli's work came at the beginning of the 1980s, when the artist, a keen observer of the world of outsiders, unsparingly depicted the scenes of the punks, squatters and drug addicts who populated the so-called "Needle Park" behind the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. The result was a bitter one, characterised by a deep and existential empathy. These pictures of the "No Future Generation" were among those shown to an international audience at the exhibition in honour of Comensoli at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1989. On 2 June 1993, at the age of 71, Mario Comensoli died of a heart attack in his studio on Rousseaustrasse in Zurich.