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ROSE OF THE WINDS
A JOURNEY THROUGH THE WORKS OF GIAMPAOLO TALANI

by Elisa Gradi

Giampaolo Talani’s story is well known to the public. His personal and collective shows,
which have brought him to the forefront of the art scene in recent years, have been
increasingly more frequent and have culminated in the exhibition of his most important
work, in September 2006: the imposing fresco in the Salone Viaggiatore hall in the Santa
Maria Novella train station in Florence. But, in this retrospective, which begins with
a few works from the early 1990’s, Talani seems to want to express precisely what has
sustained is artistic endeavour for the last twenty years. He pushes us to understand the
transitions that have brought him to his well-known present day achievements. And,
finally, he allows us to gain an understanding of the stratified fabric of emotions, instincts
and passions that have animated his story.
Today, Talani’s narration is expressed through a symbol: the rose of the winds. Not
the geographic representation of the eight pointed compass rose that indicates the four
cardinal positions and the direction of the winds, but a flower, a rose that sheds its eight
petals and relinquishes itself to the wind. This symbol returns continually to his works
in recent years, so much so that we can consider it part of Talani’s distinctive illustrative
language. And today, it assumes another significance as a guide, or still better, a flag
marking the feverish rhythm that pulsates alternately in the salient moments of Talani’s
work and life.
There are eight thematic moments that reflect different pictorial -mental ideas, eight
temporal transitions (that are mirrored in his expositions) in which linguistic and thematic
variations are intertwined into a mixture which results in an element of continuity: the
cyclic re-proposing of the landscape and the suggestive, mutable characters who animate
it.
It is this very landscape, and its entire well-noted gamut of mutability and metamorphoses,
that Talani religiously interrogates and presents in his paintings, over the course of the
years.
It is the landscape of the soul that the painter reconstructs each time, more or less
explicitly, in the depths of his paintings. It is the seashore, resonant with sounds and
shrill noises in the summer season, and replete with melancholy silence and the sour,
stale, salty odour in winter afternoons. It is the meeting of a sea and the sky along the
horizon that Talani imagines traversed by improbably boats.
There is an unending sense of change, of a fatal exposure to the turbine of the sea wind
that unexpectedly, without warning, lifts things and people into the air.
Biographical generalities and everyday occurrences, live encounters, as well as the setting
originating from fantastical extrapolation, are poured into a cascade of humoral stories.
Nature’s ability to sow the seeds of restlessness and bizarreness in individuals, becomes
the focal point of his works, the visible result of an inexhaustible gamut of perceptions
and sentiments.
Therefore, we follow this path and its symbols through the halls of Talani’s memory.

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