Opening: Wednesday May 3 2017, from 6:30 pm
On view: May 4 – October 31, 2017
“Feast of colours” is made up of about twenty art pieces (two tapestries included). Tarcisio Merati pictures his own personal and perfectly free alphabet, all in a color explosion with no counterpart in the Outsider activities of the time; a very colorful graphic language expressing the varied mental world of one of the most powerful indeed less known artists in the Italian Irregular Art world.
In 1975 Merati discovers painting and till 1983 he attends the artistic studio inside the mental institution every day, producing a great amount of work. “Freed” by painting, Tarcisio chooses to be reborn creating a different reality from the one he is living in. He needs a different code; he wants to draw and painting, inventing, raving. That’s why he chooses the mental hospital even when his sister decides to take him back home. For seven years Tarcisio is not painting anymore. He keeps asking her to go back to the “castelletto, small castle” (this is how he names the hospital). Finally in 1991 he is sent to a retirement home close to the hospital where he can go back to the painting studio. His world fills up with new images, he produces his own personal language. There are the “uccelletti / little birds”, the “macchinette / small cars”, or the “turbines”, “Italy’s maps”, decorated “alphabet letters”, “aeroplanini / small airplanes”, “insects” series. These are the symbols, expressed in a variety of forms and colours which come off the painting and invade the space around, making rich, emotional, bright, and ultra-modern Merati’s opera.
The artist is known only by a narrow group of collectors: in 1993 there has been his first exhibition at Teatro Sociale in Bergamo presented by Vittorio Sgarbi. But there are going to be the international exhibitions, “Oltre la ragione. Le figure, i maestri, le storie dell’arte irregolare / Beyond reason. The figures, the masters, the stories of Irregular Art” by Bianca Tosatti, in 2006, in Bergamo and “Banditi dell’arte” by Martine Lusardy and Gustavo Giacosa, in 2012 at Halle Saint Pierre, in Paris to consecrate his fame between the historical authors of Outsider Art.
Galleria Maroncelli 12 – Milano
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