Cesare Tacchi: From Matter to Spirit

The Art of Cesare Tacchi presented in an extensive retrospective at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome

Cesare Tacchi, Palazzo delle Esposizioni

Cesare Tacchi, La Primavera Allegra, Tappezzerie Series, 210 x 301 cm, 1965, Cesare Tacchi Una Retrospettiva, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

My first memory of Cesare Tacchi (1940 – 2014) goes back to my childhood. It was the end of the 80s and I must have been 6 years old. Cesare and his wife Rossana were among my parents’ closest friends and sometimes, on weekends, we used to go to Cesare’s studio in Torrimpietra, in the countryside of Rome, not far from the sea. It was a large estate, with some stone-made rural houses and former stables that had been converted in artist studios. In spring and summer we’d go there for lunch. A long wooden table was placed outdoor, between Cesare’s studio and their stone-made house, and many people, both guests and neighbors, would join, eat and drink. There was a jovial and free atmosphere, a bucolic and Dionysian vibe with lots of laughter, art and wine.

As usual when I was little, I’d get tired of sitting with the adults and, if Cesare’s daughter Gaia – who was a bit older than me – didn’t feel like playing with me, I’d sneak away to snoop around Cesare’s studio. As tiny as I was back then, his large-scale works, especially the Tappezzerie (Upholsteries), were so fascinating to me because the surfaces would stick out of the frame (I’d never seen pictures like that before) and they reminded me of “my sofa and chairs”.

He kept this same studio until his death, in 2014.

Cesare was an observer. He didn’t talk much, but he’d rather look at you straight in the eyes with his big blue ones. He would say unsettling things just to see how people would react. He liked to provoke and you had to catch his drift to understand his particular irony. Being unconventional was central in his life as much as in his work.

As a kid, but also later on, I’ve always found Cesare intriguing and I was in awe of him. I grew up surrounded by his drawings and paintings – hung on many of my parents’ home walls – and I’ve gotten lost in his metaphysical landscapes more than once.

Cesare Tacchi, Renato e Poltrona, Tappezzerie Series, 160 x 120 cm, 1965, Cesare Tacchi Una Retrospettiva, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

The Show

The exhibition Cesare Tacchi. Una retrospettiva is the first retrospective dedicated to the artist, and a felt homage that the city of Rome paid to one of his most brilliant and unique artists. Tacchi’s creative life and artistic career inform the chronological installation of over 100 works. Curators Daniela Lancioni and Ilaria Bernardi sought to present his work in the light of an artistic production that’s emblematic of nearly half a century of cultural and artistic evolutions.

The show takes over the entire first floor of Palazzo delle Esposizioni; each room displays a creative phase and the respective body of work.

The exhibition’s path begins with Tacchi’s early works from the late 50s, which reveal, in their stylistic variety, a stage of experimentation and a search of his artistic identity. We see some abstract canvases that show an interest in American Abstract Expressionism, particularly in Franz Kline – whose confident, black brush strokes Tacchi saw at an exhibition at La Tartaruga Gallery, in Rome. The monochromatic sculptural pieces, like Giallo Cromo (1961), recall, instead, the modernist work of Louise Nevelson, the American sculptor who, in fact, made her European debut right at that time, in the early 60s. As the exhibition will remark more than once, Tacchi was well informed and attentive to what was currently going on in the art world.

Exhibition View: Cesare Tacchi, the Oggetto-quadri (Object – pictures), 1968, Cesare Tacchi Una Retrospettiva, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

In 1964, photographer, journalist and gallerist Plinio de Martiis opened La Tartaruga Gallery in Piazza del Popolo, in Rome’s historic center. De Martiis was a cultural agitator with an inventive mind who discovered and promoted the most avant-garde artistic talents in the city. Tacchi was one of them, along with Renato Mambor, Fabio Mauri, Cy Twombly, Mimmo Rotella and Yannis Kounellis (among others).

This group of young artists who gravitated around La Tartaruga became known as “La scuola di Piazza del Popolo.” The members of the “school” shared a common interest and intent towards artistic experimentation, yet their researches were diverse and landed different results. There were conceptual voices, like that of Mambor, one of Tacchi’s closest friends; investigations on new pictorial languages, like in Twombly, or works that employed new, unorthodox materials and media like in Kounellis, a key figure of the “Arte Povera” movement.

Cesare Tacchi never fit under any label. The work he produced in the 60s certainly reflects the socio-cultural context the artist lived in: the Rome of “La Dolce Vita,” Fellini’s iconic film that well describes the city’s sweet, glamorous lifestyle of those years. Rome was, in fact, the epicenter of the cultural avant-garde in Italy and La Tartaruga Gallery a major creative hub for international artists and a meeting point for actors, writers and intellectuals.

Exhibition View: Cesare Tacchi, large-scale paintings realized in the 80s. Cesare Tacchi Una Retrospettiva, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome.

Cesare Tacchi, I Fidanzati, Tappezzerie Series, 130 x 200 cm, 1965, Cesare Tacchi Una Retrospettiva, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

Tacchi’s Enamels and the Tappezzerie – on view in rooms 2 and 3 – poignantly express this effervescent atmosphere. The former is a series of enamels on canvas in which the artist translates his passion for urban life’s fast movement and vehicles, like cars and trams. As Ludovico Pratesi notes, these subjects are rendered in detail, similarly to photographic close-ups, showing awareness and a critical use of the advertising visual practices of the time.

The Tappezzerie or “relief-paintings” are the body of work Cesare Tacchi is mostly known for. In those padded, convex surfaces the artist has found himself, his signature style, and the visual language that will always be his own. Here his subjects are friends, acquaintances and archetypal characters of that period, portrayed in relaxed and happy situations: people chatting on a sofa, lovers lying in bed or a man chilling in an armchair, like in Renato e Poltrona (1965). Sometimes references to the history of art appear as in La Primavera Allegra (1965), where Tacchi explores Botticelli’s Primavera in a modernist, pop way.

Using neat and simple traits, the artist represents a happy humanity enjoying life, evoking that creative fervor and excitement that defined his daily environment, at the end of the 60s.

In 1968 there is a change of route with the performance titled Cancellazione d’Artista, held at La Tartaruga, whose photographic record is on view at the Roman exhibition: the artist stands behind a glass sheet that he starts painting until the color completely deletes his image. In conceptual fashion, Tacchi declares the supremacy of art over the artist.

The next few years represent a rather conceptual phase, and probably the least known to the general public: sculptural pieces – the “oggetto-quadri” (“object-pictures”) as he called them – with minimalist echoes, drawings and objects characterized by more symbolic, essential and silent signs. It’s a stylistic register that recalls the “Arte Povera” experience of Giulio Paolini, which once again suggests Tacchi’s attention to his contemporaries. In 1972 the performance Painting reverses the statement of the 1968 action by deleting the paint from a glass sheet, allowing his image to reappear. In doing so, the artist reclaims his position as the creator.

Cesare Tacchi, Painting, 1972, Cesare Tacchi Una Retrospettiva, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

Elisabetta Catalano, Cesare Tacchi – self portrait, photograph, Cesare Tacchi Una Retrospettiva, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome

From the energetic “matter” of the Tappezzerie, Tacchi gradually transcends into the art spirit (“spirito dell’arte”), a vision that he manifests in an ambiguous figure that will become a sort of trademark during the 80s. A metaphysical, shifting form that is the hand of the artist/creator force, in the form of the three fingers that hold the brush, which “hides” as a bird, “Uccel di Bosco,” only to come back again as artist spirit. The last room is dedicated to the large paintings of the 80s, which present a new language that leaves space to art’s pure formal elements of color, shape, rhythm, and space.

Cesare didn’t receive the recognition he deserved in life. His work has been underestimated and overlooked, like the one of many great, true artists before him. He wasn’t a prominent figure in his circle because he chose to stay true to himself, unconventional and independent until the end.

The exhibition allows the art to speak for itself, restoring the artistic value of his original style and the artist’s place in our visual culture’s history. Now his legacy will live on.

Cesare Tacchi. Una retrospettiva, PALAZZO DELLE ESPOSIZIONI, Rome. Through May 6th, 2018.