Ritratto di Marinetti poeta del Golfo della Spezia 1934

Enrico Prampolini made this portrait, 'Marinetti, Poet of the Gulf of Spezia', without fixing it to a specific year. Looking at this painting, I imagine Prampolini pushing the boundaries of representation and abstraction; how can you capture a person's essence and their connection to a place? The paint is smoothly applied, creating flat planes of color that merge landscape and mindscape, poet and place. That red line snaking across the face—it’s like a path, or maybe a thought taking shape. It reminds me of the way Cy Twombly would scribble on a canvas, trying to capture a feeling or idea in a single gesture. The color palette is muted, with blues and browns dominating, which gives the painting a slightly melancholic feel. The painting is both a portrait and a landscape, and it invites us to think about the relationship between the two. Like other futurists such as Boccioni, Prampolini tried to capture the dynamism of modernity, not just what he saw, but the feeling of movement and change, pushing painting into new territory.