Tiger, 1958
In the 1958 drawing Tiger, Ligabue entrusts the pencil with the task of digging into the heart of the beast—and perhaps into his own. There is no color, no impetuous brushwork; everything is line, scratch, vibrating mark—a nervous, unstable dance that conveys a living internal tension, as if the animal were forming before our eyes under the pressure of unstoppable expressive urgency.
The tiger, captured in a moment of apparent stillness, is never truly at rest. Its wide, magnetic eyes observe us, challenge us, pin us down. Its gaze is hypnotic, charged with primal energy. Closed jaws, tense muscles, an almost ambushing posture—all suggest imminent action, as if the paper itself were no longer able to contain it.
Ligabue represents his creatures not to idealize them, but to reveal their raw, instinctive nature. In this tiger, we read a metaphor for his own interior world: solitary, unpredictable, tormented. The drawing is not an exercise in style, but a self-portrait disguised as a feline—a silent confession emerging from every hesitant or forceful stroke.
The choice of black and white, seemingly restrictive, becomes liberating. It allows Ligabue to focus on essentials, building form through the visual rhythm of hatching, contrast, and shadow. The result is an image that pulses, breathes, and seems ready to leap from the page at any moment. This tiger moves in a mental space rather than a physical one—symbol of power and threat, but also of wild, misunderstood beauty. A perfect emblem of Ligabue’s world, where animal instinct is never distant from the human soul, but rather its most sincere, brutal, and perhaps truest form.