Tino Stefanoni, born in 1937, is one of the protagonists of the history of Italian art in the post-war period.
In 1968 he held his first solo exhibition at the historic Galleria Apollinaire in Milan with an introductory essay by Pierre Restany. Since then his works have been exhibited in numerous national and international galleries, museums and public spaces.
Tino Stefanoni's work, although not strictly belonging to conceptual art, has in fact always developed in the same area of research.
He has always looked at the world of everyday things and objects, proposing them in their most disarming obviousness, like tables of a visual alphabet or pages of an instruction booklet where images replace words.
In many paintings all the elements of a suggestive romantic landscape recur, the night, the little tree, the wall of a solitary house, but everything is taken to such an extreme as to achieve the opposite effect to that of the romantic emotion: the appearance of things is made to settle, with a detachment subtly veiled with irony.
The enchanted disenchantment, Painting as an object, The state of facts, Objective irony, The illusion revealed, Platonic loves, Emoticon, Metaphysics of everyday life, Irony poetry and so be it, Magical conceptuality, The enigma of the obvious, Painting of the mind, are some significant titles of texts written about his work.
Between 1976 and 1983, using a magnifying glass, he created a series of paintings and lithographic works like pages of a diary book where images replace words. He called them lists: “List of things 1,2,3 …”.
For Stefanoni, painting is a means and not an end, and the same is true for the objects of his figuration: they are tools for research, not the end of the research itself; each work is a point of arrival of the artist's work and is at the same time a starting point for thought.
"Solo un poeta autentico riesce a raggiungere – con un tratto minimalista e una tavolozza altrettanto essenziale – una intensità visiva così liricamente pregnante. Ho incontrato Tino più di 40 anni fa, queste due qualità prevalgono tuttora nel suo lavoro."
Arturo Schwarz - Stefanoni. Catalogo ragionato delle opere, 2017
From 1984 onwards Stefanoni created the Untitled ; the landscapes and still lifes, which from then on would constitute his work, have the metaphysical distance from reality of all his other works.
They do not want to explain, but to represent a state of affairs.
In the same period the artist, with an analytical method, continues his research using graphic techniques including silkscreen printing.
In an interview he declares that his painting is colored, not painted: there is no pictoriality or atmosphere in it, vibrations and subtleties are excluded, only evidence and brilliance.
Tino Stefanoni disappeared in Lecco on December 2, 2017
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