Le Oasi e i Deserti di Mario Schifano: storia di paesaggi e memorie coloniali

Abstract

The painter Mario Schifano was born in 1934 in Homs (Al Khums), a small town in today's Libya, at that time part of the so-called Italian ‘fourth shore’. The landscapes of his childhood therefore consist of African deserts and archaeological excavations, observed from the privileged viewpoint of someone who belongs, by right of blood, to a colonial power. These places, from which the artist was violently torn away in the 1940s, re-emerge as autobiographical memories in several phases of Schifano's pictorial research and in particular in the Oases series of the second half of the 1960s and in the Deserts cycle of the early 1980s. The aim of this paper is therefore to analyse these works in the light of the biographical story of the painter and his family, re-contextualising these works within the context of an Italian history of fierce colonialism, and re-reading the strongly orientalist and stereotypical structure of these landscapes in the light of the scholastic and social upbringing of a man brought up under the hegemonic cultural influences of Fascism.