Tano Festa

Brother of the artist Francesco Lo Savio, Tano Festa was both a painter and a photographer. After completing his education in philosophy and photography in Rome, Festa wrote poems that he distributed to the people in Piazza di Spagna.

Festa exhibited for the first time in 1959 with Franco Angeli, Mario Schifano and Giuseppe Uncini at the gallery La Salita in Rome, which would present his first solo exhibition in 1961. The works of this period had an unusual force, and would be defined by De Chirico as “modernist chaos”.

Adhering to informal and gestural art, he painted monochromes and objects of everyday life, especially shutters, mirrors and windows, which had been fascinated him since his childhood. In an interview from 1987 he would state that in that period he found inspiration also in the work of Matta, Tobey, De Kooning and Pollock.

In 1962 he travelled to the USA with his colleague and friend Mario Schifano, and they participated with Baj, Rotella and others in the exhibition “New Realists” at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. In 1963, following the suicide of his brother Rosario, he started painting with unprecedented rage, dipping his fingers directly in the paint. It was in this period that he came up with the idea of reversing American Pop Art with Schifano, by revisiting famous Italian artists of the past, such as Michelangelo and Leonardo, and interpreting their pieces as advertisings. In fact, according to them, and unlike Americans, Italians still consumed cultural images.

In 1964 he exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale. The 1970s marked a difficult period in his life: addicted to drugs, medicines and alcohol, he lost his creativity, and lived in poverty and isolation. The 1980s brought him back to the artistic life and saw him painting in a more figurative way. His works arose from an intuition, a historic picture, a movie or a dream and television images.

Weakened since his early age by a bad health, and after a long illness, Festa died in 1988.