Born in Nuoro in 1937, Tanino
Sedda moved to Brussels at a very young age to learn graphic design techniques.
He was later attracted by the cultural climate in Austria, and by the figurative
culture in Central Europe in general and Paris in particular.
This passionate identification
with cultures profoundly different from his own can clearly be seen in his
paintings, especially in their graphic design influence, a typical stylistic
predilection of Central European figurative culture—suffice to think of the
Expressionist movements and, before them, in the late nineteenth century, the force
of Jugendstil in Vienna and Munich, of Franco-Belgian Art Nouveau, and the
Munich Secession with Klimt as its numen.
Sedda also followed this line
and then also the completely different one of Cubism and Surrealism.
In the sixties and seventies,
he opted for the tangible aspects of reality and, for this reason, could be
described as a new “realist”, one not fond of the whole hero persona. Working
and behaving with a great spirit of independence, at that time he followed the
line of a romantic realism, “making art” with extraordinary freshness and
seeking authentic ways for personal communication.
His compositions would
certainly have inspired one of the many dreams of André Breton, the surrealist theorist
and poet.
Perhaps the very way he
related to others might have been the result of naivety and a lack, as he put
it, of cultural preparation, but he behaved the same way, even when he was quite
deservedly included in important exhibitions such as those in Biarritz and Paris in the seventies,
which caused a widespread stir in the world of critics and collectors.
What surprised the most was
the extremely refined quality of his works and the ability of this apparently
“disordered” character to create order, to set unprecedented measures for the
aesthetic form, to respond with a successful sense of execution to the most
daring proposals of the modern art and neo-avant-garde movements. His “compositions”
are dominated by an acute reflection, a linearity and an apparent simplicity
that conceals an unsuspected complexity.
His symbolism became more and
more geometric and, after so much travelling, he retired to his workshop in
Torreglia Alta in the Euganean Hills where manual and mental work intersected,
identifying themselves, speaking only in the silence of his compositions.
A man with strong
Mediterranean features and ironically bright eyes, he was an artist of great
moral and cultural magnitude, who did not make the mistake of approaching forms
that were more anonymous than abstract, but arrived at a new artistic
production of “dialoguing forms”, deliberate attempts to open dialogue between
them and us, the observer. A language that he traced back to classical sources
without possessing that sophistication of culture linked to present and past
movements, which, had it existed, would have led him to be, in his own way, a
solitary “metaphysical-cubist”. Marked
by a distant cubism, this is the style to be found in his final works.
Tanino Sedda was a child of
the artistic culture of our time, which he however interpreted according to the
elements of his own personality, a perfect emanation of his own being, in a
daily, eternal effort to which he devoted all his energy, in a relationship of
dedication and passion that the most sincere and therefore the truest artists manage
to achieve.
An artist who interacted
directly with the world, not with the aim of subduing or distorting it, but
with the typical attitude of ancient Sardinian culture that relates to nature with
sacred respect.
Enamoured of his art, to which
he sacrificed much during his lifetime, Tanino Sedda revealed a quality shared
with some of the great artists of the past: a tormented, loving search for
detail and perfect harmony, the attainment of an ideal form of compositional
balance and aesthetic expressiveness that was apparently unattainable.
He pursued all this until his
death in Padua in 2000.
His works can be found in numerous public and private collections in Italy and abroad.
