EmilioTadini

a multifaceted soul

Poetry

Emilio Tadini, a multifaceted soul, was a charming man with many qualities: active in the cultural debate, surprising in writing and painting in cast acrylic, without ever missing a line.

We met him for the first time in his studio in Milan, in a long, narrow basement of a typical Milanese house, with big doors and vents facing out over the busy street, allowing the light to filter in. We entered in the factory of dreams, filled with books and silhouettes of fairy-tale characters, organised precisely, with a myriad of virgin canvases arranged on the one hand, with many finished ones on the other, and at least four on tripods, ready to be painted.

And there he was, sitting on an old barber chair stained here and there with colour, to observe the work just finished. Two minutes before starting to daydream with us.

Forms and figures of the dream world are told in the reflections of light on the glass mirror surface; a fantastic language amplifies the changing moods that seem to have no border and gives real depth to their characters, animating life of their own.

Glass is a kind of trap for the light: it captures it, slows it down, gives it value and then, after changing it, frees it. Stained glass adds colour to the light. That the light brings out, transports it, spreads it.

Biography

Although he is best known as a painter, Emilio Tadini was a man of well-rounded culture, an art critic, writer, essayist, novelist, poet and journalist. His “integral” and “intertextual” poetic, aims at the free flow of ideas, a “lively variety” of relationships and connections between dream and thought, present and past, tragic and comic, that distinguished him as one of the few “complete” intellectuals of our country.