Emilio Tadini's retrospective exhibition in Cannobio.

The exhibition season at Palazzo Parasi in Cannobio begins with a retrospective exhibition of  Emilio Tadini , an artist, painter, draftsman, sculptor, and designer. He was also a writer, translator, poet, art and literary critic, and journalist, collaborating for many years with Il Corriere della Sera. From 1997 to 2000, he was President of the Brera Academy.

The title, Fairy Tales by the Lake, pays homage to Lake Maggiore, where Tadini used to go with his family, guests of his close friend  Valerio Adami , with whom he had founded the European Design Foundation of Meina.

Approximately 50 works, including paintings and sculptures, in glass and metal, retrace the highlights of the artist's rich production, from his early works in the 1950s to his latest research dedicated to Fairy Tales.

The great cycles on which the master focused his attention often have blurred boundaries, as one series was born at a time when another was not yet completely interrupted. The paintings are constructed according to a logic of overlapping different temporal planes, in which memory and reality, tragedy and comedy, coexist. Each work is open to a plurality of meaning and interpretation.

Passing through Life of Voltaire (1967), the audience encounters the philosophers who dance (The Philosophers' Ball, 1990s), the waltz of thought in the City (Italian City, 1988) and among the Refugees (No Particular Place to Go, 1989), emblems of the human condition and the confusion we all feel when we lose our points of reference. The solution seems to be the Fairy Tale (The Three Painters' Tale, 1990s), the imagination, with which we forge our identity and can finally be free. 

The artist's figurative and dreamlike research investigates the mystery of man, moving between the influence of English Pop Art, De Chirico's Metaphysical Art and other suggestions.

The relationship between the figure and the written word has always been fundamental to the artist, in a play of contaminations. Painted or sculpted words, words in painting or sculpture, as in his splendid Flowers. It is not for nothing that Umberto Eco defined Emilio Tadini as  "a writer who paints, a painter who writes ." This very connection between word and image will be explored in the solo exhibition "Le figure, le cose" at the Brunitoio in Ghiffa, from July 3rd to 25th.

La mostra, inaugurata il 19 giugno e aperta fino al 29 agosto, è organizzata in collaborazione con l’Archivio degli Eredi di Francesco e Michele Tadini, la Casa Museo Spazio Tadini, la Fondazione Marconi di Milano e il 091 Art Project.