Numerous exhibitions and publications have enabled the historicization of artistic experimentation in Italy in the 1960s, with analysis of the pictures, sculptures, installations and performances, the poetics underlying these works and the biggest exhibitions that promoted them. The same cannot be said with regard to works on paper, even though they often form a parallel laboratory no less significant than other types of production considered to be “greater”. This is the case of the works on paper made by Tano Festa between 1960 and 1967 and now on display at Galleria Il Ponte in Florence.
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. […]

Ilaria Bernardi, Tano Festa son paper, text in the catalog