Page 49 - GIAMPAOLO TALANI

significantly, they are the only group that is presented as united to the viewer. But, being
part of Departure, as we have already seen with the orchestras and the groups of travellers
on the waterfront, it is only an apparent togetherness. Behind them is the seaside with
its dunes and a series of beach umbrellas that are beginning to fly away in the force of
the sea wind. As in an eclipse, the sun is slowly being obscured, and a man follows, who
opens his arms to the viewer (leaving a wake in the air behind his waving hand, as we
have similarly seen for the shadows projected onto the beach.). He is portrayed together
with another person, ties and hair jostled by the wind. They lower their heads, absorbed
in their private thoughts, concentrating, meditating on their departure. Casually inserted
in the composition, as in the fresco in the train station, are the familiar symbolic images
of fish, shells, small boats, and profiles of female figures, rendered with the immediacy
and innocence of the infantile drawings. They have matured from the mere decorative
elements in his first paintings, and here, are proposed again thus marking the continuity
with his previous research.
Examples like the ones we have just described, that reproduce sections of the fresco
in Santa Maria Novella train station, from the end of 2005 and for all of 2006, nourish
a large group of paintings and preparatory studies. Talani’s preparatory work for the
Departure has been long and intense, equally as intense as his period of reflection post
factum, because of his desire to review the processes which resulted in the composing
and creation of the parade of nineteen monumental travellers in the fresco in the train
station in Florence.
In Two shadow friends (2005 cat.), in which we again see the representation of the
embrace between father and son, we have the opportunity to reconsider the long creative
process that has brought Talani to consolidate the compositional idea for the Departure.
From the beginning of 2005, it is intertwined with the development of Shadows. This
the last thematic element that we will analyses here, and it is this theme that introduces
us to Talani’s present research.
The shadows appear for the first time in the period of Salty Stories, and are always associated
with the figure or the landscape. They prove their presence through projections onto
the waterfront. The shadows are rendered frontally, immobile, illuminated with back
lighting in silhouettes, which normally refer to the presence of a living person. They are
clearly part of an unknown world, presences from the past that are fleetingly incarnated
having passed through the imaginary curtain that separated them from the real world.
Unlike in poetic expression, (that Talani also considered and studied in this youth) these
shadows aren’t a second, obscure identity, a funereal crier from the world of the dead.
On the contrary, these images appear to allude to “friendly” souls, who come to life
through the power of the viewer’s memory. The theme of memory thus returns to take a
central place in Talani’s poetic artistry. This memory is intended as a blinding light that
restores life (“ Only darkness kills them.” Talani writes in referring to the shadows.). It
is the only element that can reveal the sense of a presence. The light neither models the
shadows, nor reveals merely its’ fantastical apparition; the image, now more than ever,
passes from contemplation to vision.
In his recent group of works, Talani again uses the pictorial tool of the wall as the field
onto which to project his figures. Here, the foreground is ever closer to the viewer.
We can see this in The shadow and the blue rose (cat.), where a shadow, stripped of
its substance, stands out against the faint light of a wall upon which a rose has been
left. Stylistically, Talani translates the figure’s appearance through undulating and
discontinuous brushstrokes, open to scintillating combinations of light and darkness.

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