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Emilio Tadini
L'uomo dell'organizzazione. L'uscita dall'Eden, 1968
Acrylic on canvas
162 x 130 cm
EmilioTADINI
About Emilio Tadini is considered one of the most original personalities in Italy’s post-World War II cultural landscape. He was a graphic designer, novelist, poet, art critic, journalist and painter. His whole oeuvre, seemingly simple and straightforward, offers multiple layers of meaning with its dreamlike elements, everyday objects and fragmentary, often faceless and anonymous figures.
Tadini is unique in the Italian art scene, as he had adopted aspects of the Pop language when the movement was already on the wane and conceptual art and Arte Povera came into fashion. Tadini has never been much intrigued by the superficial and glossy American Pop Art but was much rather interested in the more introspective and at times even intellectual British Pop Art. Although British Pop had been the artist’s point of departure with everyday objects playfully populating his canvases, his interest in the unconscious and the irrational induced him to depict scenes of fragmentation and alienation reminiscent of Surrealism.

Emilio Tadini was born in Milan in 1927. His early years were marked by a classical education and a deep interest in literature, art and philosophy, which would remain central to his life and artistic approach. After earning a degree in literature and philosophy at the University of Milan in the early 1950s, he started to write essays, novels and poetry. He has always been an avid theatre-goer and reader and has been particularly interested in American literature: both Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land had been highly influential texts for Tadini as both authors had merged the high as well as the low language into their texts. He has been an art critic for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and has translated texts by Stendhal, Céline, Faulkner and Melville into Italian. Because of his love for literature and the written word, Tadini has always been a cross-disciplinary artist. Or as one of his friends and contemporaries, the writer Umberto Eco, has put it: “Tadini was a writer who paints, a painter who writes”. He was in constant search of new languages and forms of expression – both on the blank page and the blank canvas.

Tadini’s works from the early 1960s were still very much influenced by Max Ernst’s Surrealism and the mythical creatures of a Hieronymus Bosch. In the mid 60s he broke open the picture and reassembled the strewn around figures and objects into energetic depictions and vibrant paintings thereby creating a pictorial stream of consciousness. Already these early paintings show the disintegration of the narration and the focus on individual recurring objects like certain pieces of furniture, lamps, sunglasses, ties, shoes or faceless figures. For Tadini these objects become archeological relics: “Without the presence of human figures as such (…) the objects seem to tumble slowly into an archeological dimension.”
Tadini started to commit himself to a new figuration which he saw as an effort to “represent the complexity of the relationships that constitute reality”. Prompted by a profound interest in Freud’s psychoanalysis and especially his Interpretation of Dreams, he developed paintings with multiple layers of meaning which focused not solely on the depicted objects per se but much rather on the relationships between them. He called this new representation integral realism, a term that included both the conscious as well as the unconscious. Also Pop Art, especially the British interpretation of it, became an important influence for Tadini.
In 1966, his Milan gallery, Studio Marconi, had collaborated with the Robert Fraser Gallery in London and had organized a group exhibition with the likes of Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Richard Hamilton, Derek Boshier and Eduardo Paolozzi. Tadini has therefore had first-hand access to these artists and their works. A shift in his own practice is clearly visible during these years as also he started to integrate popular images, references to art history and elements from high and low culture into his paintings. Though often associated with the Italian Pop Art and Narrative Figuration movements, Tadini’s work stood apart for its intellectual density and literary structure. His canvases often resemble visual novels: populated by floating figures, fractured architectural spaces, and enigmatic signs. Human silhouettes, mannequins, stairs, windows, and fragments of language are staged in painterly theatres of meaning, ambiguity, and memory. The art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalle notes: “Pop Art (…) was not a direct participation in everyday reality, (…), because Tadini analysed not so much the quotation of objects as carried out by those artists but rather the intentionality and purpose behind the quotations, which he felt was “mystifying”. (…) Irony and protest were at the basis of British Pop art, whereas underlying the American version was simply the uncovering of mass mythologies, and enunciation.”

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Tadini amassed a large photographic archive of objects, urban landscapes, interior views, still lives, figures in all sorts of poses and advertisements. He subsequently started to use these images by projecting and tracing them onto canvas thereby combining two media. He transformed the surface of the painting into a projection field onto which he projected his images. These canvases are characterised by a combination of elements from low and high culture, art historical references and pop cultural images. Some of his best-known series from the late 1960s, Vita di Voltaire, L’uomo dell’organizzazione, Circuito chiuso and Color & Co., were made using this technique. Also for Viaggio in Italia from the early 1970s, Tadini resorted to his photographic archive. The series Color & Co., which was prepared for an exhibition at the Studio Marconi in 1970, is an homage to Tadini’s profession. Even though disconnected objects like a football, a tie, an open envelope or a metronome hint at a life outside of the artist’s studio, the main focus of these works is on the numerous paint buckets holding the artist’s most precious asset and the large, monochrome bathtubs brimmed with paint. For Tadini “(…) in this series the paint itself has become one of the objects that forms part of the narrative.”

As in Tadini’s previous bodies of work, he does not depict stories but paints a selection of disconnected everyday objects onto his canvases. The art historian Francesco Guzzetti notes in his 2021 published book Emilio Tadini: The Reality of the Image 1968-1972: “Like still lives, Tadini’s paintings propose nothing more than the pure object, rendered in the denoting quality of paint and in the internal arrangement of the space of the painting”.
Georg F. Schwarbaner puts it in a nutshell: “Each object, each symbol, every fragment of a sentence and of a word has its specific meaning. Tadini’s compositions resemble an image-encyclopaedia of our century.”

From 1965 onwards, Tadini regularly exhibited at the Studio Marconi in Milan.
During the Seventies he has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, London, Antwerp, the United States and Latin America, both in private galleries, public spaces and museums.
In 1978 and 1982 Tadini participated in the 38th and 39th editions of the Venice Biennale.
A major travelling retrospective took place in Germany in 1995 and 1996 which included the museums in Stralsund, Bochum and Darmstadt. The exhibitions were accompanied by a monograph edited by the art critic Arturo Carlo Quintavalle.
From 1996 to 1999, exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Paris and Verona followed.
In 2001, the Palazzo Reale in Milan hosted a large retrospective of Tadini’s work.
From 1997 to 2000, Tadini served as the President of the Brera Academy in Milan and remained a public intellectual until his death in September of 2002.
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