REVIEW BY DOCTOR FRANCESCA MARIOTTI

THE DEPTH OF BEING
Giuseppe Tarantino, a photographer, an artist, a painter and therefore a person with a particular sensitivity for the things around him. He has an immense desire to profoundly express the BEING of our lives, in the form of monochromes that enter the canvas, using it to go beyond that which the surface alone is no longer able to communicate. His works are created in an essential way, with one or two colours at most, on which wounds or spaces are opened, in which ropes, rags and buttons are the word and figure to reach the other, the visitor, the world. How can one possibly fail to see, right from the start of his search, a desire to “break free” from the dual dimension and search, in photography and painting, for the third dimension as a necessary element of the work?! His whole path is centred around a play on shadows, light and shade, the material insert, the chromatic contrast of that which emerges and that which is immersed. A dual image always tried to emerge from his drawings and initial paintings, even those which were more abstract; pastels and collages were highlighted by black shadows and bright colours which leapt out from them, or by grids of signs contrasted by different colours. And now, in the material creations of this latest period, the essential search for deep and unconscious emotion emerges from plots that invade the surface of the work, both entering its third dimension (see “Beyond the surface”), and growing on its area with fabrics and ropes flooded with colour and material (as in the series entitled “Object like material”). In these monochromes it is the light that reveals the intimacy of the work, drawing attention to flakiness, raised areas, cracks and paths with ever differing emotions and multiple revelations.
This is the need of the man and the artist of today: to search for the truth and the reasons of our BEING, i.e.: the meaning of life, offering us tiny beams of light to enable us to understand better!

Doctor Francesca Mariotti,
January 2007

BEYOND. Giuseppe Tarantino
“…You are tied to a cord, and within the context of this cord you are free. Beyond this you cannot go“. (Sri Sathya Sai Baba)
It is as though the artist is frenetically searching for a direction, for a road that goes beyond, with considering whether there should be, or whether there is, a boundary. Consequently the works of Giuseppe Tarantino engage in a path of considerable introspection and research into the FOLDS OF LIFE, they entwine them, they overcome them, they wind them, they cut them and they sew them back together, tying them together in a continuous game of references and allusions that connect perfectly to the elementary and repetitive symbology of historical minimalism. Supported by an endless impetus, his action shows, while it hides, the beating heart of original creativity, lacing and unlacing forms in an infinite game of references and inventions.
You don’t need a masterpiece to get the idea, all it takes is a grain, a spark to ignite the flame in the eye hungry for vision. It is more the idea than the style that fills minds, and its incalculable repetition never descends into sterility. On the contrary, it expands and shrinks its links with even the most minimal passages and variations, which coagulate it every time, the same and yet different.
So, more iconic than narrative, art reveals the taste for obsessive rhythm, the matching and assembling of atypical materials, such as rope and fabric, as well as the inebriating vagueness that characterises the search for “something”, without ever being able to say that it’s been found: the representation of the inner world.
The gestural nature of weaving and the operation of the loom represent the materialisation of a glance at totality. The loom as an expression of human creation is explained in the capacity to reproduce all the movements of the universe: rotational movement, helicoidal movement, the horizontal shift, the zigzagging progress of the weft, the rise and fall, the vibrations of the fixed structure, all accompanied by the gestural correspondence, expressed in the movements made by the artist to create the work. A ritual almost similar to the creation of a Tibetan MANDALA, a deep meditation exercise and a search for inner harmony, for illumination on existence itself.
It isn’t necessary to present reality in a world in which we have every technical means required to do so. Nor is it necessary to “create” beauty, because it already exists in nature. It isn’t necessary to instrumentally instigate emotions: it is however necessary to rediscover “our” emotions, “have fun” telling the things our mind elaborates. So the artist becomes a means of regaining the ESSENCE of life, the source of our whole existence, which is inside us and not outside us, BEYOND every superstructure, every false divinity and false value, free from the Superfluous that surrounds us and deceives us that it is importance. Tarantino’s art is the expression of essentiality; purely abstract, objective and anonymous, free. Like every minimalist painting, it is expressed in monochrome, often using tracks and grids, evoking a sense of the sublime. The construction of wefts hides the incessant search for movement, for motion that allows the artist and the spectator to escape reality, to enter an “other” psychic and dreamlike dimension, that BEYOND, where space and time become lost in infinity.
The formal value used by Tarantino to create his works is dictated simply by a real need to complete the work essentially and almost hermetically. It reminds us of the path of Piet Mondrian, who achieved the most simplified and effective expression in the search for a perfect inner balance.

Doctor Francesca Mariotti

 

REVIEW BY UGO FELICI

Tarantino also demonstrates that he has successfully acquired and metabolised previous experiences in the field of all things Informal, if we think of Burri, Tàpies and Fontana, and has succeeded in processing them in a personal and original way. This is even more obvious in his works as of “Beyond the surface”, “Infinite link”, “Wave”, where one detects the effort to break free from restrictions linked with the two-dimensional nature of the canvas, to attain a concept of space, no longer perceived as a physical entity, but as mental space, not the place of the work, but the work itself, a tool for communication in an age of unstoppable technological progress. Now we see the appearance of rope, a material of considerable symbolic value, the thread of memory, entwining past and present, connecting, an intimate and deep link with the inner self, where the outside world is absorbed, filtered and transformed, to be restored to its essence.

Ugo Felici

REVIEW BY DOCTOR VALERIA S. LOMBARDI

All too often, to the point where it has become an almost pitiless constant, artists feel that they are called to make that confused pilgrimage into experimentation with numerous materials.
This is all practically inadmissible, because very often, these numerous materialisms conceal nothing more than the formal vacuum of a research which will never take place.
Everything must be reassessed, giving merit where it is due, in the case of Giuseppe Tarantino.
Naturally in his work too we can see several varying passages, buttons which have still to be properly modulated, but at least he has full control of the creation of Art. Splendid art. Art which succeeds in arousing emotions even in tacit monochromes.
The uniqueness occurs in the crossing, attempting and daring to surpass even Lucio Fontana, because, at the end of the day, the same great master had built for himself alpha and omega… but in succeeding in overcoming this limit, Giuseppe Tarantino has succeeded, through his daringness, in offering us something that excites us, that makes us dwell over those balanced incisions, spaces of canvas, where this is never completely ablated, but turned back onto itself. So we look at works such as: “Search in the depth” and “Wave” where simple elements like string manage to join and give value to everything. It’s wonderful to know how to invent something new and different to create on the ancient, primitive canvas. I commend his way of looking at things, which might be a little naïve but has succeeded in creating “monsters” of fine Art.

Valeria S. Lombardi
Doctor in the history of contemporary art
Graduate of Milan University

REVIEW BY PROF. GIUSEPPE NASILLO

The itinerary along which Giuseppe Tarantino moves is articulated in the name of an aesthetic discourse denoted by a tangible atmospheric involvement, in virtue of an intelligent confluence of creativity, executive technique and outcome of the symbolic value, achieved with the use of material components that enliven the canvas with allocutions and visual metaphors.
Its main aim is to activate colloquialism, supported by motivated existential choices, condensed in those lacerations of the surface crossed by plaits and lines, becoming the interpreters and revealers of apertures which transcend mere contingency and proceed under the stimulus of an intus legere, i.e.: an excavation into profundity, in order to recover the essence, the reason, the primitive nucleus of the living substance.
The supervised audacity of the tears, the calibrated measure of the clefts, the fluid symmetry of certain tonal bivalence, with bits of filaments or geometric modulations of pregnant, mobile optical architecture, underscore a personality which transforms the artistic moment into an emotional gesture, nevertheless rooted in a perception of the world organised and structured like an ideal habitat of its magmatic inner effervescence.
Tarantino entrusts his metopes created with composite material with the function of transforming themselves from occasional assumed static elements into communicating monads, with windows that take the eyes and mind beyond the limited and limiting Euclidean dimension.

Prof. Giuseppe Nasillo

REVIEW BY PROF. ARCH. GIANLUIGI GUARNIERI

Giuseppe Tarantino’s art is the expression of pure abstract essentiality. In opposition to mimesis, or the representation of all things real, Tarantino searches for unprecedented emotions in the innermost fragments of the soul, from which “Hidden links” and “Fragile equilibriums” emerge. Through the meanderings of cosmic spiritualism, the artist rediscovers the origins of the formal elements that make up the syntactic foundations of visual language. Initially drawing inspiration from the figurative themes of Paul Klee and then from the artistic experiences of Lucio Fontana and particularly of Piero Manzoni, he implements a process of increasingly radical simplification of forms, finding his formal freedom in the essence of a pure minimalist dimension. Rationality lacking in external references but with long roots in the world of introspection, of quiet observation of the universe, emerges. In this way, the artist reconstructs a new aesthetic universe, investigating life, the centrality of feelings, the webs of human relationships, limits and the boundaries of perception. Ropes stretched vertically, horizontally and obliquely, balance the cuts with their maximum tension, creating infinite links and totally unexpected spatial depths. Colour is elegantly relegated to monochromatic symphonies of white, black or both shades skilfully combined. This re-composition, an apparent reconstruction of the universe, hides the search for an “Other” temporal space, which holds jewels of artistic vitality in the deepest casket. Tarantino’s art has something hermetic yet gestural about it; man isn’t forgotten, just reproduced through his dynamic motions, his material work, the hub of dreamlike introspective paradigms.

Prof. Arch. Gianluigi Guarneri

REVIEW BY GIANNI LATRONICO

THE RAREFIED SCULPTURE-PAINING OF GIUSEPPE TARANTINO
Slip knots don’t tie tangles ropes, they solve psychic riddles, to reveal the intimate disagreement, the overall vision, the sublime art of Giuseppe Tarantino, winning over the user and attracting him into a maze of thin walls, closed doors and open windows.
Convinced asserter of minimal art, he gets the maximum from the minimum, the essential from the superfluous, the absolute from the relative, the abstract from the figurative, the surreal from the real, applying the rules of sculpture and architecture along with the notes of music and poetry to painting.
Sculpting the features of celebrities, glimpses of walled houses and the profiles of Italian landscapes into the diaphanous light of burnt lime, he adds no artificial colours to the natural colours, removing both to subtract matter from real things and make them rarefied, ethereal and interior.
White string wraps around spinets, spirals, boards, vertical and horizontal reels in a context of slits, hatches and chinks in the early afternoon, in the penumbra, against the light, offering glimpses of zombies in the wings, mannequins between the doors, spectres among the hanging ropes, flying creepers and diagonal threads.
Giuseppe Tarantino carefully prepares the panels, canvases and cardboards with a small block of Cementite, acrylic and distemper to then lacerate it is connective rhythms of spatial concepts, stratospheric ideas, deep thoughts, in a mixing of fantasy and eccentricity, genius and caprice.

Gianni Latronico

GIUSEPPE TARANTINO
is an emerging artist, a member of the latest
generation, who entrusts the idea of a sculpture-painting outside of the norm to
the spatial concept, with walled doors and open windows, string spiral boards,
ribbon diagonal frames, fabrics at tears in balconies, doors and shutters. He
has the gift of infinity, succeeding in creating immortal images with a tangible
manner, abstract thought, the pure ideas of his celestial hyperuranium, against
all earthy vanities. White string, burnt lime and dreamlike monochromes manage
to sublime matter into spirit, prose into poetry and sculpture-painting into
pure art.

Gianni Latronico

GIUSEPPE TARANTINO
enters the collective imagination, with a new and disturbing stylistic code which eliminates old rules, chains and red tape, abolishing bright colours in favour of monochrome, the traditional canvas for boards, panels and cardboards, open to the shadows of black and the light of white, with the burnt lime of plaster, the dynamic perspective of relief and a preference for glimpses. Open windows, closed doors, flying diagonals and wandering clouds lend movement to his pictures, packed up with transparent string, to his sculpture-paintings, sometimes highlighted with shocking pink, and his installations, for miniature gardens.

Gianni Latronico

TIZIANA CORDANI – THE CHRONICLES OF CREMONA

Tarantino’s conceptual creations offer a new take on psychology and philosophy
The “Immagini Spazio Arte” gallery is showing the creations of a young artist: Giuseppe Tarantino, who has filled it with his multi-matter creations. Conceptual creations following in the wake of Vedova, Fontana and others who have opted for the expunction of objective data in favour of a symbolic and aniconic dimension open to a variety of interpretations. The result is an art form that draws on philosophy and psychology for inspiration and moves away, in terms of material and form, from painting in the strictest sense. In coercively repeated formulations. The function of links is repeated in a knotting and untying of ropes that weave a spatial dimension proposed as a metaphor of existence. Sometimes passages of threads are added and they too weave a path that unites or divides the terms of a conversation with evident symbolic value. The result has a certain suggestion, which the black background against which red woven filaments sometimes stand out accentuates, highlighting the various components, sometimes smooth, sometimes in relief, that cross the support, in the same way that the hollows and bumps of the canvas emerge with evidence due to their differing capacity to absorb light, an element that links Tarantino to other artists of the same current, all “grandchildren” of experiences that originated in the Sixties and Seventies from the meeting between different European and American abstract and informal art forms.

Tiziana Cordani La cronaca di Cremona

MASSIMO CENTINI – ALTERATIONS OF SPACE (IL CORRIERE DELL’ARTE)

The “breakthroughs”, cuts and openings in the works of Giuseppe Tarantino
Giuseppe Tarantino is an interesting artist who has created a language all of his own, learning from great innovators like Fontana and Burri, re-elaborating the influences of neo-Abstractism, even problematically approaching the most audacious solutions to that complex universe that, due to force of habit, we call “avant-garde”. His recent show, presented at the Jolly Hotel Ligure in Turin, offers the chance to see the work of this artist who, quite frankly, arouses a subtle empathy within us, involving us in a particularly stimulating mechanism of fruition from an intellectual viewpoint. In fact Tarantino’s works offer “food for thought”, because the poetic apparatus is sublimed into a pictorial construction articulated around a strong desire to create new instances of approach to painting, completely built on the process that regulates the relationship between the viewer and seeing. The “breakthroughs”, cuts, openings and other alterations of space he uses as a term of reference between what we imagine and what we actually see, are accesses to an “other” world, maybe opportunities to go beyond appearing and access the dimension where it is possible to go back to being. Then, as though in response to an unconscious need that almost seems to hold back the thrust towards the search for communication, the artist uses ropes and thread to recompose the lacerations, re-compact the universes in which he has desired a sort of escape point, maybe a vision. Perhaps a hope.
Opening and closing, leaving and staying, freeing oneself and imprisoning oneself: in the tough game that the artist plays, contradictions abound and provide material for research, pretending to destructure themselves, only to reappear stronger, always.
Tarantino’s work undoubtedly offers numerous opportunities for reflection and discovery: his is a poetic corpus which constantly requires comparison with a difficult compositional material, not easily “attackable” by the user who lacks a basic preparation or the desire to go beyond the blocks of convention.
The artist has chosen to look beyond, rather than stop in the easy meanders in which to manoeuvre in order to avoid difficulties, without any jolts, with the strength guaranteed by the “effect”; Tarantino has, in fact, taken the steepest, hardest road, the road that forces the user to think, and even to feel disturbed.
His works are actually an important opportunity to think about painting and break free from all the clichés: most importantly, they have the prerogative to be suited to those who are willing to place the rhetoric of the sign at stake, considering the possibility of rebuilding dialectics.
“Open works”, definitely, but also a very clear picture of the artist’s desire to attempt a new language, even when it echoes poetic paths which have already left their mark on modern and contemporary art. Originality resists and makes particular pleasing those works in which space and time are constantly re-dimensioned, following the directions that the artists succeeds in taking in the eternal battle between meaning and significance.

Massimo Centini Il corriere dell’arte

REVIEW BY IVAN FAVALE

Being and surface
Let’s imagine that we are walking through a cultivated field. We’ve just risen from a banquet with friends and relations. A happy atmosphere reigns in the farmhouse, but the wine has left us drowsy. Or perhaps it’s woken us up and sharpened our reflexes compared with before. Suddenly we’re filled with the desire to get up. We want to escape from certain combinations of glances.
Untying ourselves from the lazy sense of civil, social and relational habits. We look outside, without worrying about the after-mealtime shudder, in search of a new link. In nature. When we were at school, we usually considered nature as trees and greenery, even during the most boring philosophy lessons. Cartesio (René Descartes): Cartesio is a meadow, a nature and at school we never reached the end of the programme. We didn’t study the best philosophers, the best stories and the best novels due to a lack of time. We did study Cartesio. We didn’t study the masters of suspicion, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx. These three authors investigate the black holes of nature. The shadows, the pictures behind the trees. But let’s get back to our man. Walk as far as the eye can see. The farmhouse is far away in the distance. No houses, no objects. Only an altered dimensionality, a breath and a perception that are at one with our thoughts, like an intense chromatism by Rothko. Our existence is a mental gust and a breath of experience. The furrows in the earth mark our pace. In these situations, the meadow, the carpet of granules of soil, are a new reality, perceivable according to slow spatial and temporal scansions. Personal yet universal. Let’s imagine tripping over this stretch of reality. What does this drape of Cartesian reality hide? It hides the traces that the maestros mentioned above began to inspect. There’s a beautiful picture by Giuseppe Tarantino, Riscoperta della verità (Rediscovery of truth) that provides the focus for the subject of the debate, which shows us, in a manner of speaking, the situation we are describing. The same extension beyond the Cartesian experience.
Oltre la superficie (Beyond the surface) says our author. Superficial doesn’t mean negative. In this case, the negative lies in going beyond. In overflowing. The surface is the position. The thesis. The speaking out. The ladybird explores our finger without fear of the abyss. Inspecting realty, becoming involved with it, from an artistic viewpoint, means travelling along the visible side and having the courage to enter the black forest of meanings. Moving from the surface to the abyss without significant cognitive interruptions. The new sense that we investigate is an authentic direction. A “where are we going?”. Art is interrogated sometimes without colours. Only with more or less intense shades of disgust at the foolish observation by those in search of a sterile description of the patinated finish. Art is really a surface to be touched and crossed in a process of familiarisation which will then brush the gorges, the shady areas. Giuseppe Tarantino’s materials are friendly. Sometimes in his works reality suffers knocks, distortions, influences and folds. The support, at a certain artistic level, is a field in which important lots of significance are played. The search remains on
fragili equilibri (fragile equilibriums), in response to the critics of conceptual art. Here the dynamic sense of human thought doesn’t end with a cold technical approach, but preserves its musical harmony. Tarantino’s iconic plot can be likened to the warm electronics of Depeche Mode and doesn’t subject aesthetical enjoyment to the intellectual diktat. Spatialism had its furious soul. Our author, having assimilated the lessons of his teachers, concedes more to the taste of observation and abstains from exposing us to the terror of the unknown. String plays a verifying role. It insinuates between the areas, messenger of that certain artistic insolence that looks under rugs. Achromatic surfaces herald
ricerche in profondità (researches into depth) which man tackles by immerging and remerging, on the surface of sense. We come across complex meanings tackled in simplicity or, on the contrary, in clear argumentations sub-stratified by orderly ramifications. Everything plays on the link (or to use a fashionable term, the “web”) and on the references that appear before our eyes in the author’s strings. Beyond the surface isn’t the unnerving shadow but something which is easily possible, the meeting with another way of explaining the everyday reality of being. Poetry is imprisoned in certain moments of Tarantino, but my favourite moment is that of links. Splendid links. In this cycle, reality is split and re-composed according to the tie-rods that allow us to catch glimpses of laces and wrinkles that reveal an alphabet of solids and vacuums, liable to tonal changes, like the strings of a metaphysical harp. The mark of Giuseppe Tarantino is polite and forceful without the two being opposed. The truth is not unique and the links are infinite. The inside and out border with one another and there is no net caesura between them. This stratified experience in constant motion is a manifesto of the conceptual node. Contemporary capacity (and duty) to adapt and renew in view of the changing creation/destruction of reality, both material and ideal. The meaning of Tarantino’s work lies, in my opinion, in the direction of meditation and reflection, of the shared articulation of new solutions. It seems to me to be a very sincere way of making art and approaching the voices of nature. The man is fresh and dynamic and, after holding a fistful of soil in his hand, he carries it with him, in his pockets. He walks towards the farmhouse. He embraces his companions, reconciled with being, dropping pebbles on the terracotta tiles, illuminated with new light.

Ivan Favale

REVIEWS ON NEWSPAPERS

Il Resto del Carlino – Il Giorno – La Cronaca – La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno – La Nazione – Il Sangone

 

REVIEWS ON MAGAZINES

Infoline notizie – Più, supplemento del quotidiano La provincia

 

REVIEWS ON ART MAGAZINES

Percorsi – Euroarte – Boè – Corriere dell’Arte

 

YEARBOOKS
Acca in arte 2008 L’ ELITE new – Selezione internazionale d’Arte 2008

 

ART BOOKS
“I grandi Maestri” – edizione 2007 – Centro Diffusione Arte Editore