Page 53 - GIAMPAOLO TALANI

Rose of the Winds
A journey through the works of Giampaolo Talani

by Fabio Canessa

On the waterfront, Giampaolo Talani’s anthropomorphic “animals” are ready for an
unlikely departure, together with their suitcases, their fluttering ties, and their thoughts,
memories and reassuring but perplexing expressions. Heroes without an adventure,
they maintain, all the same, the mysterious attraction of a Corto Maltese. They are
Pierrots, clowns, without any make-up, who nevertheless, retain the dignity of those
who stubbornly face life and its illusions and disappointments. They are travellers, some
what worse for wear, who conjure up post-modern versions of Giosue Carducci’s 1873
bitter and disenchanted poetic observations, “ At the station on an autumn morning”:
“Where and to what do these people go, so hurriedly along/ toward the dark train cars,
turned inward and silent/ to what unknown sufferance or torment of distant hope?”
The anonymous trappings of their clothes don’t hinder our ability to see their internal
lacerations; they are torn to pieces, here and there, by the painting that intertwines them
with the dreams that crowd an imaginary world. Among the dunes and the shadows,
under the rays of the sun and the night sky illuminated by summer fireworks, they are
waiting, searching, listening to seashells for a revelations or perhaps merely some news.
They are, in fact, alone, even when they are in the company of others. All the while,
the sea wind is violently blowing and it confuses them. In the existential democracy
of the waterfront, the living and the dead mingle together without distinction; it is not
easy to tell them apart, because the living are already somewhat dead and the dead still
participated in life. They are the fathers that we remember and still wish to encounter;
they are children to whom we have entrusted our hopes for the future, our memories
and dreams, humiliations and our aspirations. If a night of falling stars were ready to
give them an occasion to fulfil their dreams, to collect their joys, they would instead
curl up in a ball in order to protect themselves from it, refusing to take the risk of
tempting fate. This is because their soul is humble, because it lacks courage, or perhaps
because the dreams have exhausted any foolish ambition or energy. The sand castles
continue to represent the fragile, delicate, ephemeral architecture of longed for projects
of unexpressed desires. Symbolic talismans, like the rose, and objects that can release
their held-in existence, like the musical instruments, reoccur, almost as if beauty and
art have the ability to offer a buoy, a mooring, a life-preserver, for these lost pilgrims
and to orient them in this bewildering voyage that is the uncertain road of life. Talani’s
work obsessively interrogates the coordinates of this life-voyage, in the dizzying space
of the beach which, free and limitless, is nevertheless always represented in the same
way, generating a paradoxical and claustrophobic effect. It represents a time when the
past mixed freely with the present and with the imagination. So, with a completely
contemporary sensibility, the various seaside fantastical visions, among windswept beach
umbrellas and little women flying on the wings of male desires, touch on the theme
of identity. Talani’s characters form, through a hypnotic game of mirrors, continual
variations of the self-portrait together with the portrait of each of us.

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