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The show
Twenty years after the death of Emilio Tadini , a prominent painter, writer and essayist on the Italian scene, at the headquarters of the archive, the Spazio Tadini House Museum, in via Jommelli, 24, takes place from 1 June 2022 to 15 April 2023 the exhibition Le città: l'Etico e lo Spazio which displays canvases, unpublished documents from the archive and the artist's writings. The exhibition and related events will be organized in collaboration with the Corriere della Sera Foundation and the Marconi Foundation.
Tadini took an interest in the city as a space for relationships, cultural growth and development to the point of electing it as a symbol of the culture of a people. He talked about it through his painting, with a dedicated pictorial cycle, Italian Cities (1988-1991), in many of his novels that have the city of Milan at the center (such as The Long Night, 1987, and The Tempest, 1993), but also dealing with issues relating to the public management of the city in his articles in the “Corriere della Sera” and in other publications such as the magazine “La città” conceived in 1997 by Carlo Orsi with Tadini, Vergani, Giorgio Teruzzi and Gianfranco Pardi.
This exhibition is an ideal continuation of the one completed on March 5, 2022 at the Giò Marconi gallery in Milan, Viaggio in Italia, testifying, once again, the importance attributed by Tadini to the relationship between man and the landscape.
The artist wrote in the catalog Le città Italiane, exhibition at the Renault Branch Show 1989:
“We could argue that Law is to Ethics as Architecture is to Space. And we could also argue that it is in Law that the Ethic shows itself, makes itself seen, just as Space shows itself, makes itself seen in architecture. And if it is true that (…) it is easier to speak of Law than of Ethics, it is also true that it is much easier to speak of Architecture than of Space. (…) We could even go so far as to say, but in a whisper, that there is something in common, between the Ethical and the Space ”.
The ability to analyze and ask questions of existential and gnoseological value is a characteristic of the artist. Precisely for this reason, much of his work possesses the great ability to interpret important contemporary themes. Recent history requires us more than ever a reflection between the Ethics and the Space. It is for reasons of "space" and "right" that wars are unleashed - like the one in progress - and, for the same reason, houses and cities are destroyed or built, which for Tadini are "an ordered system of distances ".
Emilio Tadini, born in 1927, had seen houses destroyed during the last world war and this look at cities illuminated by the moon, inhabited by giants and clowns, and crossed by refugees, metaphorically reminds us all of the existential journey of each one, where tragic and comic are not in opposition, but consequential, and where, to some extent, the repetition of history is manifested.
“The tragic is (let's remember Nietzsche's work) is ecstatic, the comic infinitely temporal. One would never stop laughing. (...) Tadini first uses the comic to express the tragic (...) he uses certain mannerist showgirls to multiply the mechanical nature of things, to make them become an anti-nature, to make repetition possible. (…) What is seen is the demoralized city (…) the myth-city ”.
(Mario Santagostini, Italian Cities, catalog of the exhibition at the Galleria D'Arte Contemporanea of Arezzo 1989).
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and Tadini, always an attentive observer of society, around that year was dedicating himself to two pictorial cycles with emblematic themes: the Refugee and the Cities. As he wrote in the catalog of the 1989 Triptychs exhibition (which began his production of triptychs in the last years of his pictorial work), myths and values had fallen, the world was taking a new direction: "the collapse of the great systems at our shoulders have this good thing: that its fires can light the way while we are going away somewhere else ”.
Today we are moving somewhere else and Emilio Tadini's exhibition on the city is also an opportunity to talk about it with a series of meetings that will involve figures from art, politics, journalism and culture. Cities, Ethics and Space
from 1 June 2022 to 15 April 2023
inauguration June 1st at 6.30 pm
open from Wednesday to Saturday from 3.30pm to 7.30pm
Guided tours by reservation 10 euros: melina@spaziotadini.com
