Gitarella al fortino del Verena di quelle pazze ragazze delle sibille assieme a quella musona di Cassandra che non ne indovina mai una! (A little trip to Fort Verena by those crazy Sibyl girls together with that grumpy Cassandra who never gets anything right!) already contains, in its unusually detailed title, everything that Enrico Robusti’s (Parma, 1957) work has to offer: four female figures dressed in garments with bold floral patterns, riding in a speeding car, their hair depicted as if blown by the wind. The scene unfolds in a clear, bright blue light, where the vivid colors of the dresses and the heavy makeup on the faces contrast sharply with the gray ruins in the background—a fort, indeed, the symbolic destination of a countryside outing.
The long, ironic title functions as both caption and interpretive key to the work: although the figures are dressed and made up in a contemporary way and travel by car, the reference to the classical world places them in a distorted temporal dimension, suspended between past and present.
At the wheel sits Cassandra, whose evocation recalls the priestess and prophetess of Greek mythology: Cassandra is the unheard voice who foretells the fall of Troy without being believed—an episode central to both the epic and to history itself, which Robusti celebrates with irony.
Cassandra is not alone, but accompanied by the Sibyls, prophetic figures of Greco-Roman antiquity, whom the artist reinterprets in a playful and irreverent tone. The result is a short circuit between myth and history: a surreal scene, devoid of geographical references, imagining these protagonists of ancient history on a cheerful little trip to Forte Verena, a First World War military structure located on the border between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The expressionist aesthetic heightens the sense of disorientation: the figures are deformed and grotesque, their faces crossed by anguished grimaces and restless sneers; the perspective twists, and the acidic colors clash violently with one another—the little trip takes on dark undertones.
Enrico Robusti’s painterly style seeks a constant tension between the figurative and the unreal, between references to the present and citations from the past, generating a continuous, ironic existential doubt.

Enrico Robusti, Gitarella al fortino del Verena di quelle pazze ragazze delle sibille assieme a quella musona di Cassandra che non ne indovina mai una!
Oil on canvas, 208×160 cm, 2024.

22/10/25