TANO FESTA ©

© Gaetano Festa by SIAE

TANO FESTA

Born in 1938, brother of Francesco Lo Savio (the difference in his surname is due to the extramarital relationship from which they were born), he attended the Istituto d'Arte in Rome and graduated in "Artistic Photography" in 1957. He immediately joined the group of his contemporaries Mario Schifano and Franco Angeli, with whom he and several other painters later formed the 'Young School of Rome', which later became the 'School of Piazza del Popolo'. After an initial move towards surrealist painting, Festa began to produce a series of monochrome paintings in which the surface of the painting is only interrupted by changes of material such as long strips of paper soaked in the same colour. From 1961 onwards, the surface of the canvas was interrupted by new materials such as wood, and the following year in 1962 even included everyday objects such as doors, wardrobes and windows. This was one of the artist's most prolific periods in which obelisks and quotations from the past entered the painting, while the first inscriptions appeared on the wooden frames. A terrible event disrupted his life with the death by suicide of his brother in 1963 after a long agony: the use of the tombstone symbol in his canvases followed this period. Festa also had a great impulse towards reworking the figures of the past, including, for example, the effigy of the Lucchese merchant Giovanni Arnofini: the painter in fact somehow rejected pop culture made up of commercial symbols and icons, preferring to use figures from the past in which Italy, unlike America, was rich. Thus in 1964, on the fourth centenary of Michelangelo's death, Festa reproposed a very modern "Creation of Man" in which the photograph of the detail of the fresco was enlarged and covered with enamel, as well as divided and interrupted by segments of wood, as if to slow down exponentially the gesture of the hand extended towards the man. The image of Adam and Aurora taken from Michelangelo's Medici Tombs became a pivotal element in Festa's production, even creating an entire series entitled 'Michelangelo according to Tano Festa' in New York in 1967. The painting of his maturity became almost metaphysical, with large areas of pure colour, and in his final period he turned to portraits. He died in Rome in 1988 after a long illness.