Alfeo Pauletta

ALFEO PAULETTA (Pula, 1906 - Mirano, 1997).
"Female portrait with rose", 1930.
Mixed media on tablex.
It has slight restorations and damage to the frame.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 98 x 66 cm; 110 x 80 cm (frame).
Realized the same year in which the artist concludes his formation in Rome, under the orbit of Marcello Piacentini, the painting reveals a sensibility that conjugates formal construction and expressive purification.
The female figure, represented in an introspective attitude and holding a white rose in her hands, is organized on the basis of solid volumes and defined contours, close to certain formulations of the Italian Novecento.

Alfeo Pauletta was an architect and painter whose career is inscribed in the complex cultural crossroads of the Adriatic in the 20th century. Trained in the atmosphere of renewal of Italian architecture between the wars, he graduated in 1930 in Rome under the direction of Marcello Piacentini, a central figure of Italian rationalism. Between 1928 and 1931 he occasionally participated in group exhibitions with Adalberto Libera and Gruppo 7, the driving force behind architectural modernity in Italy. From those years dates his urbanistic proposal for the Via Riborgo in Trieste (1929), as well as his early affirmation as a painter: that same year he was distinguished at the First Istrian Artistic Exhibition in Trieste with an award from the mayor for his work Il muto.
Between 1931 and 1934 he developed an intense activity in Pula, where four residential buildings and villas were built in Smareglina, Švalbina, Tartini and Vergerio streets. He was part of the so-called circle of architects of Pula during the Italian period, a group that emerged on the cultural basis of the modern movement, which sought to reconcile functionality, structural clarity and a new aesthetic stripped of historicism.
In 1935 he moved to Paris, where he collaborated with Le Corbusier and was one of the founders of the building association L'Edificatrice, an experience that linked him directly with the most advanced currents of European rationalism. In 1937 he returned temporarily to Pula, the year in which he was enrolled in the Provincial Chamber of Engineers and Professionals of Istria (Albo Unico Provinciale dei Professionisti e degli Artisti dell'Istria).
After the Second World War he returned to Italy and took up residence mainly in Venice. In parallel, he maintained a constant dedication to painting and founded in Venice an association of architect-painters.His career was recognized with retrospective exhibitions in Venice (1992) and in Pula (1994), which consolidated Pauletta's image as a bridging figure between Italian interwar modernity and postwar cultural reconstruction, articulating architecture and painting in a coherent and personal synthesis.