Mario Comensoli
Mario Pasquale Come Soli ( born April 15, 1922 in Lugano, † June 2, 1993 in Zurich ) was a Swiss painter of realism.
Life
Mario Come solos came from an Italian immigrant family, and grew up in the Canton of Ticino. After leaving school, he fought with odd jobs and selling portraits and landscape paintings by tourists. In 1943, the City Art Museum (Museo Civico di belle arti ) bought in Lugano his landscape paintings Piccolo Paesaggio and thereby received a grant from the Fondazione Torricelli, which allowed him to attend courses at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich and lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. In 1944 he met Hélène free († 1994) and married her later in Basel. During his stays in Paris Come solos became acquainted with Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and the brothers Alberto and Diego Giacometti.
In 1953 Mario Come solos as a guest of the Zurich Art Society in Zurich helmet house 65 works of art from. The oil paintings, drawings and sculptures framed essentially together his collected experiences in Paris. Critics appreciated his works post- cubist characteristics, but Comensoli changed his style because of a polemical attack in the Paris weekly " Les lettres françaises " and under the influence of some left-wing intellectuals. So Come Solis cycle of paintings was " Lavoratori in blu ", " workers in Blue ," a series of oil paintings, which always saw the artisans of the South in the center, who had emigrated in the fifties looking for work in Switzerland and which the painter represented in blue work clothes and in everyday situations. Advised by the writers Carlo Levi and Saverio Strati, Come solos brought his paintings to Rome, where he fell into the " Galleria San Luca ," with the painter Renato Guttuso, Master of socialist realism in Italy, together. Guttoso accused him of a lack of political vision and the little elegiac character of his figures. However Comensoli wanted to be a political artist. His concern was the poetry of the peripheral figures of the company to show him they were the new aesthetic. For the solidarity aspects of his works to him the price " Nicolao della Flue " an award in 1970, of Italian emigrants in Switzerland, presents, he along with Max Frisch and director Alexander Seiler, who accepted. In those years dealt with the painting of Come solos, always strictly figurative and the dominant dictates of the " constructivists " on zürcherischem soil indifferent, the characteristic themes of the '68 protests, with stylistic inspiration to the Pop Art influences.
The last turn in the work of Mario Come solos joined at the beginning of the 80s, when the artist, who was watching the world of alternatives as well, the scenes of punks, the " squatters " and drug addicts which the so-called " Needle Park " behind Zurich Landesmuseum populated, relentlessly portrayed. The results were bitter, marked by a deep existential participation. Among other things, these images of "No Future generation" it, which were shown at the exhibition in honor Come Solis at the Kunsthaus in 1989 to an international audience were. Mario Comensoli died on 2 June 1993 at the age of 71 years of a heart attack in his Zurich studio at Rousseau Street.