Tamburro’s ode to modern metropolis

"Walking across the street"

ROME-In the hub of the ever-vibrant Rione Trevi, 6° Senso gallery’s exhibition encapsulates the tumult of the city as seen through the eyes of painter Antonio Tamburro. In a captivating, kaleidoscopic synthesis of quintessentially urban themes, the artist inserts his metropolitan scenarios into a new order of things, where all is governed by four dominant, eponymous elements: “sign, energy, colour, movement.” 

 The relentless pulse of the city seems to have a particular appeal to this Molise-born artist, who follows its meanders immersed in the crowd of passers-by, yet never losing the eagerness of a fascinated outsider. One glance at the exhibition’s striking opening piece is enough to get a sense of an art that is unashamedly contemporary – upon a closer inspection, however, it reveals a true mastery of the craft and a deep understanding of the Western pictorial tradition, which give substance and conceptual weight to the fleeting moments captured in paint.  

 Bold pops of colour erupt from between the greys and blues of “Walking across the street,” forcing us to abandon the melancholic silhouettes in the foreground and follow the brisk gait of a faceless woman on a 'consumerist' hunt. Instead of judging, however, the artist observes, and tries to keep up with the insistent pace of his model, mesmerized by the movement, rather than the body. The painting is a fitting overture to Tamburro’s ode to a 21st-century city, where individuals and their identities disintegrate and blend like the hues of the impasto brushstrokes in the anonymous crowd moved by some perpetual mechanism. It is the artist’s nameless heroines that remain the focal point of the canvasses, and whether they are pictured making their way through a busy street, or captured in a domestic, intimate entourage, their isolation from the universe of which they are part is tangible.

 Tamburro explores the sense of solitude in the midst of other people further in a series of works titled “Ombrelli,” where human silhouettes, barely recognisable, vanish under scattered coloured beads of their umbrellas, echoing Renoir’s famed “Les parapluies”, and the fascination with the everyday and contemporary is something this “neo-figurativist” painter shares with the great master. The arrangement of the room hosting “Umbrellas” allows a visitor to follow a gradual transition from figurative to abstract, as shapes and forms are overcome by paint texture and the artist’s palette becomes more and more audacious and frenetic.

 Tamburro’s art has not turned away from its roots completely, betraying an important influence of Southern Italian painting of the 19thand 20thcenturies and the realism-romanticism dichotomy. At the same time, however, it is imbued with the American tradition, as it contemplates the present and the momentary through an electrifying discharge of chromatic energy. From images of neon-lit street landscapes, through the far more abstract “Jazz”, where in a vivid synesthesia metallic hues convey the sound quality of the saxophone pictured, up to the manifestly Hopperian “Caffè di notte”: the contemporary aesthetic of the art from across the Atlantic is very much present in the Italian painter’s work, who remains, nonetheless, faithful to his own, distinctive approach.

 Two big format paintings occupying the walls of the bottom-most level of the gallery epitomise Tamburro’s style both on the conceptual and technical level, combining a compelling colour play with masterful execution. A classic nude “Melograno” operates a limited chromatic range of greys and underlying blue tones, which envelop the female model in a cold glow – and then breaks all this melancholic calm with a blast of blood-red in the shape of a pomegranate. The femininity captured is empowered, sensual, perhaps dangerous, and contrasts with the vulnerability of the woman portrayed in the neighbouring “La stanza” (“The room”). Here again splashes of bright colour compete with a backdrop of whites and greys which turn diagonally into deep browns in a dream-like vision where the human form succumbs to the rapid, uncompromising brushstrokes, which suggest the outlines of chairs left in disarray. Antonio Tamburro’s artistry lies in such an understanding of and familiarity with the possibilities offered by his chosen medium, that he can rely on the material form to express what is purely abstract. He can explore the intricacies of the human condition in the modern world without ever having to resort to easy symbolism: it is the dynamic movements of his paintbrush, the superimposed textures and colours, which convey what rings so true with the experience of a modern viewer, and create an art which is a testimony of its time not simply through the choice of subjects and themes, deeply rooted in the contemporary reality, but through the pictorial matter itself, endowed with a reality of its own.

 

“Antonio Tamburro: Sign/Energy/Color/Movement” at 6° Senso Art Gallery, via Maroniti 13/15, curated by Kasper Van Aalten. Open from Monday to Saturday, 11am-7pm.

The gallery will host a Finissage on April 30.

 

      

Ombrelli
La stanza