La scatola dei miti

Lino Tardia was born in Trapani in 1938. After graduating from high school, he refused a teaching assignment in Pictorial Disciplines at an art high school in Palermo and moved to Rome, where he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. There he met Renato Guttuso, whose first student and later assistant he was. Guttusian realism influenced his language, which initially focused on the creation of Sicilian landscapes connoted by the vividness of the palette and the clean lines.

He began exhibiting in the late 1950s and held his first solo exhibition in the early 1960s. These were the years of the Dolce vita, and Tardia came into contact and formed friendships with many of the best-known figures in show business, cinema and culture. In the mid-1960s, passing through a brief informal period, he embraced the idea of a new figuration in the manner of Francis Bacon, whom he met during a stay in London. In a continuous evolution inspired by a coexistence of geometric architectures and metaphysical depths, Tardia landed on the most recent research starting in the late 1970s. 

His youthful experience as an assistant to the excavations at the archaeological site of Mozia, the ancient Phoenician city on the island of San Pantaleo near Trapani, resurfaces through his recollection of the anthropomorphic sculpture of the Phoenician Mother (5th-6th century B.C.) whose figurative plasticism, balanced between archaic and stylized lines, inspires his painting style. Themes such as memory, the ancestral link with the nature of the Sicilian land, the myth of the Iliad and the Odyssey, become central to the language of his maturity, which consists no longer only of painting but also of sculptural interventions applied to the canvas and made with vinyl materials enhanced by pure gold leaf.