Carrying a modern idea of classicism, Mario Tozzi’s painting developed in a constant dialogue between Italy and France. In 1932, Tozzi’s The Painter (1931) was exhibited at the 17th Biennale. The painting, which belonged to the collection of Margherita Sarfatti, a theorist of the Novecento movement, is characterised by symbolic references that describe a visual arrangement in which the volumetry of forms holds in itself a purely intellectual order. The entire visual composition presents a marked structural rigor dictated by a clear scanning of shadows and planes that limit physical space in favour of an exclusively mental openness. The presence of the triangle emphasises the geometrisation of the scene, which appears to be able to accommodate a forthcoming condition of nascent life. The shadow of the nail is the expectation of an event such as the imminent pictorial action the painter is about to undertake. He is entrusted with the task of uniting ideality with the praxis of art, one as the condition of the other, eternally and cyclically like the infant and the adult portrayed and, like the sphere, without beginning and without end.
—Sonia Zampini
