Page 43 - GIAMPAOLO TALANI

with exception of one young sailor-boy. The painter’s study achieves in the upper limits
of the painting, a depth from where the only point of light enters the work. Talani
thus indicates to us his love of music, the profound sense of belonging to that world of
summer orchestras and musicians of improvisation. His self-portrait, while painting and
showing a painting on the waterfront, has the precise function of closing the group and
completing the scene. The gamut of colours is incredibly rich, intense and circumspect
in the use of graduation. The tones are azure and the grey-green of ice; they are graduated
through subtle transformations and precious modulation toward ochre, as we gradually
move into the depths of the background.
This is certainly one of the happiest moments in the Talani’s painting, thanks to the
elegance of the laborious application and the painstaking attention paid to the execution,
that enriches the details through strokes of dense and saturated colour. This euphoric
expression of passionate and but still youthful temperament, moves beyond the images
from his world of tormented depths.
At the end of the 1990’s, Giampaolo Talani’s sentiments face a change in his story, and
a renewed sense of restlessness begins to guide his hand across the canvas. A greater
sense of the fragility of mankind’s existence on earth is translated into a stylistic change
that characterizes a series of painting entitled A strong sea wind. The solid and formal
structure, that created the internal organization of his early paintings, begins to lose
its compactness. The element of wind appears in Talani’s universe. It is the painter
himself who reveals its significance in the lyrical writings composed contemporarily to
his paintings. Like an unexpected bolt of lightning, the wind strikes the men, lifts them
into the turbine that carries them off to die in a faraway and unknown land. Fragments
of lives are carried off, offending memory itself, and the actions of men who resist remain
in nothingness. It is the wind that disturbs the men on the waterfront, who represent
humanity, in a fatal appointment which they can hope only to postpone.
Talani describes the turbine, that disturbs the sea air, as a sort of purification rite that is
not without a disturbing beauty, galloping and violently shaking everything in its path,
leaving ruins behind after it ceases. But, it also leaves a clear horizon that allows the
heart to hope for a new life, to be able to rebuild anew.
With the wind’s passing, that seascape, so loved and often interrogated in his paintings,
seems transfigured to Talani. It is now a place that bears the marks of tumultuous events,
and the brush must chase after them with dusty and obscure tones. So, in place of the
dense and minute style of rendering, a long hazy brushstroke, less loaded with colour,
is now substituted, which allows space for discord and approximation, while still being
guided by the artist immutable concentration and attention.
A strong sea wind – Ery (cat.) is certainly one of the most significant compositions of
this pictorial phase. The painting has been exhibited on many occasions in personal and
collective shows and dates from 1999. It portrays the artist’s father on the waterfront,
shaken by the wind. Behind him, a series of beach umbrellas take flight and a blackened
sun camps on the seascape, projecting the dark and indistinct shadow of the protagonist
onto the beach and tumultuous sea. In his writings, Talani yet again charges the wind
with the ability to indiscriminately carry away both men and objects. The figure seems
to dissolve into the reddish and foggy dusk. The fabric of his corporal substance melts
into the bosom of the opaque and penetrating depths, acquiring the essence of a sudden
blinding light, of a fleeting vision, inevitably destined to dissipate into the unforgiving
gusts and to lose itself in the most remote horizons.
This is the same figure, having changed its appearance, which is presented in the rich

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