Cesare Tacchi. A Retrospective

Palazzo delle Esposizioni - Rome

Curated by Daniela Lancioni and Ilaria Bernardi

By Santa Nastro

Four years have passed since Cesare Tacchi (1940- 2014) died. Last February, Rome organized a large retrospective of his work at Palazzo delle Esposizioni to pay an important tribute to the artist. Curated by Daniela Lancioni and Ilaria Bernardi, it featured a selection of more than 100 works that surveyed his practice, as well as the complicated times he lived in, which witnessed immense political, social and artistic transformations. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Archivio Cesare Tacchi, began with some of his rare first works from 1959. The show then proceeded chronologically to give insight into his creative journey, accompanied by documents and historical pictures.

Tacchi was one of the leading protagonists at the School of Piazza del Popolo along with Franco Angeli, Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, Renato Mambor, Francesco Lo Savio, Sergio Lombardo and Giosetta Fioroni, as well as a friend of artist Pino Pascali. In fact, in the famous photograph by Mario Cresci in 1968, he is one of the pallbearers at Pascali’s funeral.

Cesare Tacchi’s retrospective, installation view at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome. Photo: Santa Nastro.

The exhibition featured his series of enamels on canvas, along with his famous “upholsteries.” Here he painted directly on the fabrics, sewed shapes and drew shadows. The resulting images were part figurative, part abstract, an interpretation of Pop culture in a metaphysical atmosphere. Moreover, they were seductive and full of color and represented the triumphant Italian economic boom of the 1960s.

Tachi’s body of work was based on continuous experimentation as the exhibition clearly showed. It was particularly enlightening to learn how he researched material and built a performance from the ground up, recontextualizing the meaning of common objects and creating new ways of painting. In 1967, he presented his objectpictures, sculptures that reimagined everyday objects, as in Useless Armchair. Another example was a large pictureless frame, on loan from La Galleria Nazionale in Rome, that visitors filled with photographs and selfies.

An unforgettable piece is the documentation of the performance Cancellazione d’Artista (1968), displayed at the festival Il Teatro delle Mostre (a series of one-day shows hosted and promoted by Plinio de Martiis and Galleria La Tartaruga). The event was evoked through a ‘relic,’ that was exhibited for the first time, after 1968.

One of the most experimental and unique pieces presented at that show was Untitled (Schedario degli Dei, 1972), a card index in which cards are mirrors that display names of divinities from all over the world. When visitors reflect their own image in the mirror, they feel a connection to the deity they have chosen. In the last room, a selection of Tacchi’s pictorial productions from 1980 was featured. There, the sculpture Senza Titolo. Lo Spirito dell’Arte (three fingers that simulate the gesture of holding a brush) was the star, a harkening back to the monogram that appeared in his namesake canvases produced in 1990.

(February 7 - May 6, 2018)

Santa Nastro is an art historian, journalist and art critic based in Rome. She is the author of the project arTVision and member of the editorial committee of Artribune. Her texts have been published in Exibart, Corriere della Sera, Arte Magazine, Alfabeta2 and Il Giornale dell’Arte, among other publications and exhibition catalogs.

Filed Under: Reviews