Alongside his love of writing, in the 1950s, Emilio Tadini began experimenting with a new expressive language: painting. His first paintings are the result of symbolic and figurative research that is very reminiscent of Bosch.

Tadini made his debut in the artistic field with fairy-tale painting, clearly of surrealist origin, and the synthesis that he implemented at the end of the 1960s occurred precisely thanks to the adoption of the metaphysical interpretation: the pictorial material becomes lighter, the images are less crowded, the backgrounds become clear and often monochrome, suggesting a more ideal than realistic space.

Tadini needs to stage reality, but the hallucinatory reality of dreams, an extremely personal middle ground between surrealism and metaphysics.

An allusive space, a probable “crime scene” in which the artist delivers apparently unrelated elements, whose interconnection becomes the generator of a narrative that, however, is up to the visitor alone to decode. Tadini's characters act in an allusive context, they are ironic figures, faceless as they are psychologically impenetrable and with whom the artist prevents us from empathizing. Everything is ambiguous and everything is possible.

The title of the work "Archeologia" refers to a cycle of works created between 1972 and 1973 thanks to which Tadini denounces his very concept of history and of working with art, which soon flow into the series dedicated to cities and urbanized contexts.

Technical specifications:

• Year: 1973;
• Color lithograph. Dimensions: 70 x 50 cm;
• Edition: 99 copies numbered with Arabic numerals, 20 with Roman numerals and some PA;
• Signed and numbered in pencil by the artist;
• Copy 65/99.

This lot has been donated by Galleria Valeria Bella.