Lino Tardia
Trapani, Italy
5 Works exhibited on Kooness
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Works by Lino Tardia
Lino Tardia was born in Trapani in 1938. After graduating from high school, he refused a teaching assignment in Pictorial Disciplines at an art high school in Palermo and moved to Rome, where he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. There he met Renato Guttuso, whose first student and later assistant he was. Guttusian realism influenced his language, which initially focused on the creation of Sicilian landscapes connoted by the vividness of the palette and the clean lines.
He began exhibiting in the late 1950s and held his first solo exhibition in the early 1960s. These were the years of the Dolce vita, and Tardia came into contact and formed friendships with many of the best-known figures in show business, cinema and culture. In the mid-1960s, passing through a brief informal period, he embraced the idea of a new figuration in the manner of Francis Bacon, whom he met during a stay in London. In a continuous evolution inspired by a coexistence of geometric architectures and metaphysical depths, Tardia landed on the most recent research starting in the late 1970s.
His youthful experience as an assistant to the excavations at the archaeological site of Mozia, the ancient Phoenician city on the island of San Pantaleo near Trapani, resurfaces through his recollection of the anthropomorphic sculpture of the Phoenician Mother (5th-6th century B.C.) whose figurative plasticism, balanced between archaic and stylized lines, inspires his painting style. Themes such as memory, the ancestral link with the nature of the Sicilian land, the myth of the Iliad and the Odyssey, become central to the language of his maturity, which consists no longer only of painting but also of sculptural interventions applied to the canvas and made with vinyl materials enhanced by pure gold leaf.
Among the many exhibitions in Italy and abroad (London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Houston, Ottawa, Tripoli), the personal exhibition In viaggio con i Fenici, presented in 1996 at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Spoleto and in 1997 at the Convento San Rocco in Trapani, and the anthological exhibition La scatola dei miti at the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia in Rome in 2009, are the most significant stages. Tardia held the position of professor of painting at RUFA (Rome University of Fine Arts) between 2001 and 2008, and his work has been covered by some of the most prominent national critics. In 2003 he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Culture of the Presidency of the Italian Republic. Lino Tardia will die in Rome in 2021.