Door onto the Garden (Aix-en-Provence)
Ulisse Caputo, 1918, oil on canvas, cm 60x46
(1872 – 1948)
The son of a set designer and a pupil of Domenico Morelli and Gaetano Esposito, Ulisse Caputo settled in Paris in 1899, moving beyond the dark tones of Neapolitan painting and Morellian imaginative realism in favor of a chromatic vibrancy influenced by international Impressionism. In 1918, the artist moved to Aix-en-Provence, into the studio that had belonged to Cézanne: the works from this period, such as this canvas, are characterized by a brushwork of divided and complementary touches that reveals a "pure and spontaneous sense of color." Closely aligned with Post-Impressionist experimentation, Caputo constructs form through "deliberate dissonances" and violent oppositions of light, seeking an evocative and further dimension within the intrinsic qualities of the pictorial matter.
