Magazin Du – Leben und Leidenschaft

At the end of the century before last, countless Italians came to Switzerland to build the tunnel for the Gotthard railway. From the 1960s, they were followed by labourers from southern Italy, who worked as seasonal workers in construction, factories and the hospitality industry. The Italians were met with massive xenophobia, and Italian culture was alien to the Swiss. Although their diligence and temperament accelerated the economic upturn at home and brought the Mediterranean lifestyle to the country, they were labelled as Tschingge.

Mario Comensoli, born in Lugano in 1922, loved these people: Craftsmen, farmers, labourers. Living in poverty himself, he also ended up on a building site, although he would have liked to study.

Instead, he began to paint them. Without any artistic or humanistic training, he captured the world in which they lived. He had found his purpose. In 1945, he moved to Zurich and also lived in Paris for a time.

In the course of his life as a painter, he went through five creative periods: The post-war period, foreign labour, the 1968 movement, disco and punk, No Future. He went through all the tendencies of modern painting, tried his hand at abstraction and finally found his calling in realism. Comensoli did not want to be a political painter, but to show the poetry of society's marginalised figures. He died in his Zurich studio in 1993 at the age of 71. Du is dedicating an issue to him on the centenary of his death.