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after fleeting amorous encounters, and similarly, he employs the stereotypical images of
women, painting them on the front of the suitcases, on shoulders, on the background
walls.
Thus the theme of the Departing is intertwined with that of the Waterfront Animals,
a new series of paintings exhibited, in December 2003, in a personal show at the Castel
dell’Ovo in Naples.

Yet again, it is the unwinding of a circular procession of people on the seashore, around
the painter’s observation point, that dominates the entire painting. Talani still finds, in
the intimate fecundity of that open-air workshop, the inspiration to invent new stories
and to add new tiles to the mosaic that he has entrusted his inspiration to since the very
beginning of his artistic career.
A feeling of grand togetherness (Waterfront Animals, cat.) is alternated with travellers
waiting to depart (Waiting for another summer, cat.) or with the intrepid mountain
climbers of Finisterre (Red Dunes, cat.). Other motifs for figurative invention enrich
the canvases depicting fish seekers - in which, moreover, we find an unusual freedom in
the prospective angle of the scene (Shell seekers, cat.) that recall a photographic scheme.
Also, the compositions dedicated to shadows, the soul that makes the figure, gives us a
glimpse of the future theme that will soon develop into an ever-increasing interest for
the artist.
We have thus arrived at Talani’s latest pictorial work: the fresco in the Santa Maria train
station in Florence (tav.). In order to analyse it, we must recognize it as an authentic
achievement, an encyclopaedic opus of the artist’s cultural story, which includes the entire
artistic activity that we have, thus far, considered. Years of meditation on the themes of
the waterfront, the wind, the departing, deliver themselves up in this colossal work, a
compendium, a pictorial novel, in which everything, that has been an indispensable
support to Talani’s artistic endeavour throughout the years can finally come forth.
The protagonist is the Departing, a figure that best defines the emblematic image of
the aesthetic talanian cosmos. Here, we must also include, together with this figure,
the characters and symbols, created over the course of time and during the different
pictorial seasons, which are now champions of his robust mountain of memories. In this
endeavour, Talani measures his strengths and rapidly executes an eighty square meter
panel in the technique of “bon fresco”. A technique very few artists today are capable of
utilizing, but which Talani learned during his formative years. He tests his abilities in the
various phases of the process: the drawing of the preparatory cartoon, the application of
the colour layers, the sketches and preliminary studies, the consideration of the various
compositional arrangements, and an understanding of the diversity of the chromatic and
tonal constancies of the brush stroke compared to those of oil or watercolour.
Certainly this isn’t the place for an analysis of such a complex work – for this we indicate
our previous writings – but it is worth while to stop and consider a few details, because
there are works present in this show which reproduce sections of that grand opus-
container, including pictorial and thematic experiences and significances chronologically
distant from one another.
We can see the substance of this artistic fabric displayed in one of the first painting (cat.)
in which a group of figures, from the right part of the large fresco, is reproduced. A
figure, with a fish under his arm, introduces the parade of departing. They are followed
by two figures in a tight embrace, who emerge from a pile of red suitcases, symbol of the
departure previously included in the Finisterre series. They are father and son, and

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