Vittorino Andreoli, Matto come un cavallo, 2019

Of Marino Marini’s sculptural production, the Horses and Horsemen series is for Vittorino Andreoli the only one that fascinates his mind as a psychiatrist… The author then makes a lunge on the theme of the horse and rider, to be considered as a whole that becomes in Marini’s work a topos, the representation of the relationship between man and the world.
In this study, Andreoli follows the biographical events of Marino Marini by making use of the artist’s critical literature and writings, draws from his own memory the images of horses – fictional, artistic, biblical and even familiar – that have traversed his life and history, to prepare his gaze to dwell on how the horse-rider pair undergoes a metamorphosis in Marini’s art: from a form in space that unites vertical (the man) and horizontal (the animal) lines in a static architecture of calm balances, the whole, in the works of the 1950s, is reversed and the dominant role of the rider over the horse is reversed, to the point of reversing the orientation of the elements and making the forms of one and the other tragic and indistinguishable. The psychiatrist then follows the variations in this geometry of human relations, proposing to deepen our understanding through Elena Bombardelli’s drawings that translate Marini’s sculptures into essential lines.
The analysis concludes with a reflection on Marino Marini as a tragic sculptor: the apocalyptic tones that the artist himself used to describe his statues of horsemen, less and less skilled tamers of horses returned to savagery, lead one to perceive a rupture between man and the world, the sad and dramatic image of twentieth-century society that also well represents the present time.