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maintaining the turquoise sky and radiant light of the open air. In these marine portraits,
what is striking is the use of a parapet or wall, a pictorial tool in use from the 1450’s, to
assert with a greater force the presence of the characters in the foreground, in the space
closest to the viewer.
This can be seen in the Sailor (cat.) dated 1992, where the protagonist is seated on a
parapet, his large legs crossed in a close-up, frozen in the gesture of showing the viewer
a small boat, a symbol that identifies him as a man of the sea. His body is forcefully
projected toward the viewer, with whom the sailor is engaged, even with his gaze. Every
movement, every action is absent in the painting; everything seems to be transported
into a frontal and solemn sate of ancient timelessness.
The radiant light, coming from the right, projecting the shadow of the protagonist onto
the wall, is not natural, and neither is the background, which simulates an encounter
between the sea and the sky. It is treated as a unity of graphic markings that are
intertwined with scratching and whirling segments, elongated to the point of flying off.
A series of markings emerges from a grill rendered, one could say, with an infantile
calligraphy, that conducts the viewer to a place contaminated with emotions and
memories re-emerging from an adolescent world.
What results is a prospective field, replete with distinct elements, each one responding to
its own perspective, repeated by the painter in multiple and insistent variations. Elements
abandoned by the sea are left exposed on a parapet: shells, starfish, fish, object that live
autonomously. They complete the surroundings created in the middle ground, giving
and receiving significance. Again, the stories of mute sailors are presented, projected
onto artificial depths, representing the seashore on a starry night, as in Sailor’s Night (cat.)
dated 1996, or as in the A Sailor’s Story (cat.) dated 1994, in which Talani positions the
two figures, in the company of their women, at the far two edges of the painting. Their
shared story is narrated through internal connections which are gradually perceptible.
It is again the wall in the background that creates the scale of the setting. The figures,
locked into the edges, in an almost sculptural solidness, project their shadows onto the
wall. Again Talani uses this tool to allow them to achieve an iconographic quality. The
pose grants them a timelessness, but forces them into a state of fatal, elegiac solitude.
It is the same incommunicable melancholy that winds through the painting of the
Musicians (cat.), part of those large compositions that present entire orchestras, or solitary
players, as we have seen with the sailors, frozen in the depths, in an intimate atmosphere
of enchanted silence. The reference to the protagonists of the Sailor Stories, both in
physiognomy and in composition are clearly evident. Talani’s musicians, even when
painted as an entire orchestra, seem closed in contemplative isolation, excluded from
the outside world, almost as if its the only way they can find intact, within themselves,
the profound and mysterious theme of music. Rarely are the characters portrayed
while they are playing; they are all immobile in front of the viewer, and we cannot
perceive, in their appearance, any sound, because they are absorbed and motionless in
their expressions and in their gestures. This doesn’t mean that they are represented by
foggy and colourless masks, on the contrary. Talani continues his work as an excavator
of physiognomies that he had already begun in the Sailor Stories. He thus delivers
countenances to his viewer that have been interrogated, each and every one, defined by
incisive and synthetic renderings and charged with symbolic expressions.
Musicians in the painter’s studio (1994, cat.) is a noteworthy example of this paintings
series. Even though it is crowded and vertical, the result is a harmonious and spacious
composition. The foreground is entirely dedicated to an immobile orchestra of violins,

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