Their theme and style place these three works – Battle, Battle with Flag and Battle – within a set of watercolors and gouaches of which, in 1997, the Pinacoteca do Estado exhibited eight pieces. It is a theme to which De Fiori certainly returned more often during these years, and all of which hark back either to medieval or Renaissance jousting traditions, or to ancient battle itself, as is the case of one of the three gouaches conserved by Masp. De Fiori’s interest in the classical vocabulary of fighting on horseback is evident, although he treats it in an anticlassical manner. If in the classical tradition combat is truly the quintessential occasion for the manifestation of disegno, or in other words, for the study of corporeal dynamics, of animal kinetics, of vectoring of the musculature toward the vertex of the act, of the paroxysm of the will, of the expression of matter, in De Fiori, on the contrary, the human form and the myth of equine power do not constitute the basic theme. What most interested him was to imagine both, not already governed by the drawing, but in the form of a dissociation between line and color, of a wise spatial and plastic overlaying of the memory of the classical form by the presence of the colored blotch. These three works are consumate examples of this fundamental procedure of the artist’s poetics.

— Unknown authorship, 1998