Felice Tavola - The Baron by Italo Calvino

Felice Tavola, images from the past in a contemporary context

Felice Tavola's work moves within a cultured world, informed by artistic and literary references and enhanced by the revival of a craftsmanship that feels traditional from the first moment he encounters the work. The observer is faced with fascinating artifacts with their antique patina, a patina the artist pursues while always keeping an eye on the present, a modern recontextualization that makes Tavola's style refined and personal. Felice Tavola's art, in short, speaks an archaic language, but with a modern vocabulary. Take a work like "At the Foot of the Cross," for example. We can clearly see how here the quotation and the resulting modernization are carried out at every level. First and foremost, the artifact is a reinterpretation of a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century triptych, which the artist reinterprets in a deconstructed form, dismantled and opened onto the support. The image is thus reconstructed as a series of recovered fragments that form the subject of the work. The work itself is a subtly executed reference: there are mourners, the Madonna and Saint John, at the feet of the Crucified Christ, but we see only details of the trio in a play of allusions that seeks images from our historical and artistic tradition. Even the technique, which allows glimpses of the wood grain, speaks of antiquity in a predominance of brown tones. At times, the iconographic reference must contend with an even more forced adaptation to a contemporary language. Thus, the "Annunciation" displays a highly advanced process of image synthesis, two-dimensional, flattened, and executed with a deliberately rough stroke. But once again, the circle closes in on a past of early medieval cave frescoes, with which Tavola's work shares the expressive power. In this archive of images, from which the artist draws his subjects, the reference can sometimes also take on the character of literary illustration. As in Italo Calvino's "The Baron," also transfigured into an expressionistic and synthetic rendering, or in "The Renaissance Knight," in which the artist offers a detailed description of the armor, the recontextualization being sought in the imaginative and creative flair with which the subject was conceived. This game of translating images from the past into a modern context is increasingly developed with new modalities, including that of assemblage, of the ready-made mounted on the subject of the painting: as in "The Prince and the Symphony of the Heart," in a new reading of contemporary "poetics of the object" that looks to the past.

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