Forme ascenzionali (o Forze ascenzionali) 1930

This painting, Forme ascenzionali, by Gerardo Dottori, uses a palette that feels like you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, all blues and greens, fractured and reformed. It’s like Dottori wasn’t just painting what he saw, but how he felt, the very sensation of looking up at the sky. The clouds are rendered as geometric shapes, as if the sky is not a soft, yielding space, but a construction. The brushwork is incredibly smooth, almost airbrushed, making the forms feel both solid and ethereal. Look closely at how he’s built the mountains; it’s almost like a diagram, or a crystalline structure, each facet catching the light. Dottori was, of course, a Futurist, and you can feel the influence of artists like Boccioni, but he’s got a touch of something else, a kind of mystic landscape painting that feels totally original. It is art that embraces ambiguity and infinite interpretations, more than fixed or definitive meanings.