Page 50 - GIAMPAOLO TALANI

He defines the plastic form with tangled marks, attacking it with irregular strokes of
brilliant red, underscoring that this is not a real presence, but its spiritual essence.
The treatment of the subject of the Shadows, as we have already stated, is intertwined
with the theme of the Departure and also with his established theme of the waterfront.
(We find an entire series of paintings of shadows with red suitcases, a precursor to the
future developments in the fresco in Santa Maria Novella (cat.).) The painter returns
continually to this theme in order to verify and measure the validity of the pictorial
research. So, of course, we can still find the stories of musicians, of fish seekers, of
“animals” on the waterfront, that inalienable pillar of his art.
Emblematic of this is the painting Beyond a dune (2007, cat.).
Framing a landscape rendered by essential lines, in the scale with the sand and the sky,
the painting depicts a man, who has taken refuge against the dunes, clasping a shell to
his chest as he warily looks out over his shoulder, toward an undefined point beyond the
confines of the painting. Certainly, this is one of the compositions that best exemplify the
coercive memory, vision and influences, in Talani’s recent pictorial season. Furthermore,
the artist has here returned to a paring down of the figure, similar to that expressionistic
deforming of the protagonists of his earliest works, during his time at the Florence
Academy. He ignores any problem relative to the clarity of the brushstroke, employing
earthy, almost muddy, colours, more appropriate for translating forms from the restless
magma of the imagination, evoking the intense expressive force of the image.
This is Talani’s most intimate painting, capable of containing the work’s emotive
current of in a representation of the soul. It is a painting in apparent contrast to a more
simple work, but, in reality, they are complementary and closely related, because of the
expression of a personality that isn’t afraid to expose the antimonies and conflicts that
exert themselves with in the soul of an artist – as we have revealed previously. He dares
to face his own intimate self directly, accepting his urgencies without mediation.
This is, in the end, the message that emerges from a study of Giampaolo Talani’s opus,
after a profound consideration of his thirty year artistic journey: he is an artist who never
tires of returning cyclically to his past themes, extracting, from their depth, their very
essence, following an internal chronology. He is a painter who has continued to paint
the places of his origin, despite the passing of time. And when he cannot longer look
to reality for inspiration, he frees his memory in its place. Thus, Talani encounters the
human existence and delivers it to us today in a solid narration; it is the incarnation of
a rose that the wind has partially dismembered, but that still retains many petals for the
future.

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