Cesare Tacchi. A retrospective

07.02__06.05.2018

Curated by Daniela Lancioni and Ilaria Bernardi
 

Exhibition promoted by Roma Capitale – Assessorato alla Crescita culturale; devised, produced and organised by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo – Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in conjunction with the Archivio Cesare Tacchi

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Cesare Tacchi. A retrospective 7 February__6 May 2018
Cesare Tacchi, Renato e poltrona, particolare, 1965. Collezione privata, Svizzera
Produced in conjunction with the Archivio Cesare Tacchi, the exhibition is an exercise in attention, study and enhancement, using the story of an artist to retrace over half a century of intellectual tensions. The narrative focuses on the works of Cesare Tacchi (1940-2014), to whom the city of Rome is paying tribute just over three years after his death.
Cesare Tacchi in his studio, Rome 1965  | © Photo Plinio De Martiis - Galleria Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea, Rome
Cesare Tacchi, Cornice, 1968  | La Galleria Nazionale, Roma - Inv. 6199. Foto Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Roma – su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e le Attività Culturali e Ambientali e del Turismo
More than 100 works map out his career in chronological order in the halls of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Begining with a number of rare and little-known early works, the exhibition continues with a series of enamels on canvas in which the "reality of the image" is rendered through a selection of details from racing cars and from Rome public service vehicles.

A selection of some of the most successful of his so-called upholsteries, fully-fledged icons of the "happy climate of the 1960s", are displayed alongside one another, for example the La primavera allegra (Joyful Spring) or Sul divano a fiori (On the Floral Print Sofa), both from the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. These are the well-known everted and padded surfaces on which the artist transposed a humanity consisting primarily of friendly acquaintainces, of happy couples, seated in an armchair, lying on a bed or in a meadow, alongside images borrowed from the history of art.
The exhibition continues with Tacchi’s sculptures of 1967, objetcpictures as the artist used to called them, yet they prevent all possibility of practical use, like the Poltrona inutile (Useless Armchair) or the large pictureless Frame from La Galleria Nazionale.
The renowned and extreme gesture of the Cancellazione d’artista (Artist’s Cancellation) that Tacchi made during the "Teatro delle mostre" festival at La Tartaruga in Rome in May 1968 is evoked by a "relic" displayed for the very first time at this exhibition.
The same room hosts the works he produced immediately after the Cancellation, in which his artistic language’s potential for communication is sorely tested with encroachments into a totally aphasic dimension.
He moved on from there to new phase which was epiphanic in nature and whose emblems, both dating back to 1972, are Painting, a photographic work realized by Elisabetta Catalano in which the artist proposes the diametrically opposite action to Cancellation, and a video, Il rito (The Rite), of a performance at the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte in Rome in which Tacchi reconsecrated the exhibition space by kissing it.
The last room hosts a bronze sculpture and large paintings produced since the 1980s, the successful expression of a new artistic language and of an artist who, paraphrasing the titles of his pictures, from being a Sécrétaire of painting and from being Uccel di bosco, is transformed and renewed, becoming the Spirito dell’arte.