Spatari’s canvases and oil small boards reflect impressions and emotions which arose as he followed his father through the Aspromonte villages. He captured the most intimate moments of the people’s lives, jobs, and collective, traditional and initiation rituals performed by people from Aspromonte. The war had just finished and the signs of defeat were for all the world to see. On a national level, Carrà, Mafai, Pirandello, Rosai stood out in the pictorial field; Nik would eventually meet these artists personally.
After the peregrination in the Aspromonte mountains, Spatari followed his father in his trips along the Ionian coast, in particular in the province of Reggio. Dramatic scenes of ordinary lives attracted his attention, and he transposed them into a dimension merging dream and mysticism. His figurative art was linked to Michelangelo, Masaccio and Antonello da Messina; in the meanwhile, the artist became familiar with Kokoschka and Munch.
Visions of the Old and the New Testament entangle in the works of this period, where a dynamic expressionism is dominating, with its rapid brush strokes and its strong complementary colours. Spatari spent a long time in Rome, where he got in touch with cosmopolitan environments. He visited the Lateran museum and the exhibition of graffiti on the Sahara desert. These experiences led him to a more primigenial and material vision of nature and man, which he was to experiment six years later in Paris and Milan; in this period, his works depicted figures characterized by phallic representations.
His strokes became faster and more dynamic in the schematic and anatomical outline of his figures. The geometry of the portrait prevailed in this period, the archetype of groups of women and kids in streets dominated the scene (the latter were also depicted through different geometrical schemes).
The varied sequence of nude woman art highlights a crude mathematical vision, which is deeply human rather than sensual. Once again, we see rapid brushstrokes and a variety of complementary colours. This is the period in which he identified himself with Paul Klee’s chromatic vision, in Dufy’s vibrating movements and in Modigliani’s delicate strokes.
In 1951, the catastrophic flood in Calabria deeply inspired some of his dramatic canvases. Spatari faced the effects of the cataclysm which caused destruction and death throughout Reggio Calabria and the Locride area. This is how the tradition of the flood paintings began. Spatari took part in both national and international shows, and received an award in Moscow.
After the flood and the related scenes of devastation and death, he was bewitched by the Goddess of Death, the Apocalypse Knights and shell women, on which he insisted with his research. They were all symbols of eternal and mysterious legends. Together with Guttuso, De Chirico and Morandi, he took part in the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, organised by UNAC (United Nations Appeal for Children) and UNESCO, inaugurated by Einaudi in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. The English Ambassador bought one of his works: a mother who died in trying to pass the Iron Curtain with her children. He attentively visited the Sistine Chapel in Rome, he appreciated Mosaccio in Florence and Piero della Francesca in Arezzo.
On the wake of his crude dynamic expressionism, his art englobed a materialistic naturalism with amazing examples of still life, characterised by shades of colour which, at time, became violent, as well as by segments of his art as a result of the revisitation of his favourite masters.
Electoral meetings, the Resistance and features of the cold war were dominant themes in his work. The English ambassador of the time invited him to West Berlin so that he could illustrate the dramatic issues of refugees and the repression in Hungary on posters. One of the themes he represented was a little girl with her name written of a piece of cardboard hanging on her neck, who was trying to cross the Iron Curtain. He was awarded first prize in Zagreb with “The days in Budapest” (Le giornate di Budapest). He was only 26 years old when the head of the department of Cultural Heritage in Reggio Calabria offered him some rooms of the Magna Grecia Museum for a solo exhibition that was going to last for three months. He displayed 200 works from the previous decade. Eugenio Montale wrote an article about him on the Corriere della Sera. This was his first actual success. He was invited to Rome, Milan, Geneva and Zurich.
He experimented several geometrical effects, from the cube and the polyhedron to waterdrops and abstract fantasies including urban architectural landscapes and figures flooded with unreal light and chromatic variations. These works were the humus of the works to come, which would dynamically burst into his life recalling Lausanne’s radiant prismatism. This phase was to inspire luminous and linear compositions of dancers (some art critics spoke about “the closed lines dance”).