Tano Festa

Alongside the exhibition Aldo Mondino: quadrettature e non solo 1963-72, in its lounge area Galleria Il Ponte presents a set of works on paper and a panel (Particolare di figura, 1964) made by Tano Festa between 1960 and 1967.
More clearly than his famous works on canvas or wood from the same period, these works on paper reveal that the “pop” label he was attributed in the 1960s, as an exponent of the so-called “Scuola di Piazza del Popolo”, was all too simplistic. Indeed, the central topic of his work is not consumer images in mass society, but a challenge against dissolution which he expresses using the time of photography and above all the time of history.
For Festa, works on paper are the perimeter, the screen, the framing of a detail seen as an obstruction, to the extreme of the closed windows, shutters and wardrobes, Finestre, Persiane and Armadi, he started to make in 1962. On paper, traditional painting – a window open onto the world – becomes all the more clearly a window closed on itself, or rather, a photographic frame whose fixedness transforms what it frames into a blind two-dimensional image and above all freezes it in time to guarantee its eternal life.
History is the time dimension which most interests Festa: he sees artworks as the testimony, product and depository of the collective cultural memory. There seems to be a much deeper reason behind the use he began to make of cultural rather than commercial images in 1963: making use of elements of past works of art preserves them against time and dissolution. His quotes from the history of art are doubles of the actual works. Therefore, they are recognizable, but through his intervention – painting, drawing or collage – they seem different from themselves, ambiguous, revealing the metaphysical dimensions hidden beyond what is physically visible.
All the works on display are archived in the Archivio Tano Festa.