Interno metafisico con officina

Painted in 1957, Interno metafisico con officina is an intriguing work in which Giorgio de Chirico revisited the typology of his metaphysical still lifes, a celebrated series of paintings which preoccupied the artist during the First World War. It was the renowned French poet Guillaume Apollinaire who, recognising the poetic and enigmatic quality of De Chirico’s cityscapes and interiors, first described the artist’s work as ‘metaphysical’ in 1914. By returning to these motifs, the artist once again immersed himself in the themes which had informed his revolutionary artistic vision, reasserting their daring nature in a post-modern context.
In May 1915, De Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio left the bustle of Paris and travelled across the border to Florence, where they presented themselves for military service in the Italian army. Stationed in the medieval town of Ferrara, away from the brutal front that stretched across Italy’s northern border, the brothers were deemed unfit for active service and assigned clerkships. This arrangement proved advantageous for both artists, allowing them to continue painting alongside their administrative duties. Although initially disillusioned with the regimented monotony and isolation of military life, they soon found their imaginations captivated by the town’s timeless charm.
Writing to his dealer Paul Guillaume in Paris, De Chirico described how he was ‘assailed by revelations and inspiration’ at every turn, particularly drawn to ‘certain aspects of Ferrara interiors, certain windows, shops, houses, districts such as the old [Jewish] ghetto, where you could find certain sweets and biscuits with remarkably metaphysical and strange shapes’ (quoted in A.H. Merjian, “Giorgio de Chirico’s Willful Claustrophilia: The Ferrara Interiors, 1915-18,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 1010, no. 2, June 2019, p. 56). Inspired as he meandered through Ferrara’s solemn, ancient streets, De Chirico narrowed his focus from the sweeping, unsettling cityscapes and the piazzas that had characterised his Paris years. His fresh visual and mental points of departure were informed by the enclosed, bureaucratic spaces in which he spent his days and the town beyond his window, resulting in canvases that were permeated by a sense of interiority.
It is perhaps unsurprising that with Interno metafisico con officina, De Chirico chose to turn his mature eye to this formative period, which had a marked influence on the crystallisation of his pictorial language. Drawing on the ‘painting within a painting’ device recurring throughout the art historical canon and favoured by the Old Masters and by Surrealists like René Magritte, De Chirico chose to depict a stark factory complex on a framed canvas in the foreground, dotted with workers and looming shadows of smoking chimneys. The work’s unsettling quality arises from the tension between the meticulous rendering of this composition, and the cubist abstraction of the three-dimensional assemblages in the background. These are composed of half-built frames, dismantled canvas stretchers, and fragments of wood, improbably heaped atop one another in a configuration that borders on the sculptural. The disquieting interaction between these elements, paired with their juxtaposition against the image of the factory, removes them from their logical systems of sense and perception which governs their meaning, freeing them from their true nature and allowing them to exist in multiple associational guises. In this way, the painting embodies the notion that reality is merely a screen upon which the artist may project his inner world in a search for a deeper, metaphysical truth.