File:Artgate Fondazione Cariplo - Brindisi Remo - Profili.jpg

Dated 1987 on the back, this painting entered the Collection from the antique market in 1991, along with another work by Remo Brindisi entitled Venice, Profile by Renato Guttuso and The Solitary Walker by Luca Alinari.

Known by the title Profiles, the work portrays a male figure, possibly the artist himself, with his arms outstretched towards a group of children with their mother. The subject is the same as that of a large group of paintings on the theme of the family, which Brindisi treated frequently from the 1950s until his maturity. The artist flanked works that depicted the existential malaise of modern man, such as Three Profiles in the Collection, with a repertoire of joyful images inspired by family affections and pairs of lovers. Lovers Behind the Dune (private collection) of 1952 and, later, Embrace (private collection) inaugurated a line of thematic research that the artist continued to pursue in the following years in a series of paintings on the subject of maternal love. This repertoire also included the Pastorals, inspired by the artist’s youth spent in the idyllic, unspoiled Abruzzo region. The figures in these works are depicted in intense, vivid colours and are often part of a compact group representing the only refuge from loneliness and the crisis in social relationships.

However, in the work in the Collection the dark shadow separating the mother and children from the father’s embrace and the choice of clashing colours suggest a lack of familial warmth. In other compositions, including Lovers [1] (Brescia, Musei Civici di Arte e Storia), the figures, by contrast, are locked in a fierce and oppressive embrace unquestionably inspired by the works of the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, whom Brindisi had met in Salzburg in 1956.