TANO FESTA - THE CONSUMER AND THE CONCEPT

Tano (Gaetano) Festa, Rome 1938-1988. Festa was one of the protagonists of the group of artists known as Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, reductively linked to the artistic current of Italian Pop Art, he produced works of admirable cultural depth, first of the Neo Dada mold and then anticipating the Neo Expressionist currents that exploded on the end of the 1970s.
His work, which was often mass-produced, repeated, to the point of being considered familiar and iconic. Private image and public iconography are mutually implicated, communicative and communicative in it.
The sure effect of the so-called carryovers from the iconic paintings of the Renaissance is always that of not showing the commercial violence of seriality. In this Tano Festa is how he managed to camouflage the objective and post-product level of his subjects in the painting itself, or rather, to make them undoubted objects of art. More than forty years have passed since the end of the sixties, that is, from the period in which the production of these subjects and this personal path to serial art grew. Well, for at least ten years the reinterpretation of the classics of modern art, the remake, has established itself as a trend in the world that must celebrate this Italian precedent. We distinguish, of course, the childish or surreal remake that applies standard and commercial morphologies (present in a vast area - European, Eastern and American neo-pop) from the decorative one, from what could still be defined as a tourist-artistic aesthetic of beauties of Italy, which become paintings.The sure effect of the so-called carryovers from the iconic paintings of the Renaissance is always that of not showing the commercial violence of seriality. In this Tano Festa is how he managed to camouflage the objective and post-product level of his subjects in the painting itself, or rather, to make them undoubted objects of art. More than forty years have passed since the end of the sixties, that is, from the period in which the production of these subjects and this personal path to serial art grew. Well, for at least ten years the reinterpretation of the classics of modern art, the remake, has established itself as a trend in the world that must celebrate this Italian precedent. We distinguish, of course, the childish or surreal remake that applies standard and commercial morphologies (present in a vast area - European, Eastern and American neo-pop) from the decorative one, from what could still be defined as a tourist-artistic aesthetic of beauties of Italy, which become paintings.

26.04.2021