Emilio Tadini: The Painter Who Wrote, or Perhaps the Reverse

A new book by Francesco Guzzetti, 'Emilio Tadini. La realtà dell’immagine 1968–1972' (Mousse Publishing, 2022), reexamines the Italian artist Emilio Tadini (1927–2002), challenging the common reading of his work as merely polyhedral. Guzzetti argues that between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Tadini's visual interests dominated, engaging with the avant-garde in ways not fully explored. The analysis starts with Tadini's 1963 article 'L’organicità del reale' in the Milanese literary journal Il Verri, where he revised early 20th-century avant-gardes and their legacy. Tadini defined 'integral realism' as painting's commitment to representing the complexity of relationships constituting reality, drawing on Surrealism (Max Ernst, Hieronymus Bosch) and Dada. His novel 'Le armi l’amore' (1963), about Risorgimento hero Carlo Pisacane, reflects a compositional grammar akin to his visual art, with accumulation and tension between empty spaces and words. The book covers Tadini's transition from writer to painter, focusing on works like 'Viaggio in Italia' (1972) and early pieces 'Saggio sul nazismo' (1960) and 'Coppia' (1960).