Artworks
Artistic Influences...
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From one of the artist's latest interviews in which he tells us about the evolution of his art:
"I had just discovered conceptual art, Minimalism, and I had found the freedom that I was looking for as a game between image and matter up to that moment unknown to me: precisely in the relationship with the Matter, in particular metals and neon, that I had started to create sculptures, I felt that this new line of art allowed me to express at my best my experiences of life. Because, despite what many have thought about my works, I am not an inventive artist, I've never been. The origin of my works is always figurative, but there are different ways to synthesize what you see and experience through art, something that minimalism made me understand as an illumination. Take Robert Barry, Donald Judd , James Turrell, but above all Ellsworth Kelly: Kelly was for me an absolute reference, my saint, the perfect synthesis of form and content, and it is along the path indicated by his work that I started ". .....
In the seventies I came into contact with Leo Castelli who, after seeing my exhibition in Spoleto, invited me to exhibit in his gallery in New York.
From the American experience I returned enriched by the awareness of a pure art, the one from Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin: an art with a psychoanalytic and liberating effect, and over the time has led to definitively abandon the limits of canvases and frames, the heaviness of oil or acrylic colors, and a certain theatricality of the forms. ".....
Another fundamental step for my art has been going to Switzerland, where I have been spending long periods since the beginning of the Nineties. With this country I have discovered an affinity of synthesis having acquired a formal discipline that freed me from the search for complicity with the observer and for the residues of narrative. I learned not to tell stories anymore, but forms.
Also in Switzerland, in a small stationary shop in Zurich, I discovered oriental papers: their tactile quality led me to work with watercolors, developing a code, made of dots, eliminating the defined images. It is a code, a personal writing with which I have worked for a long time and to which I am very attached, even if now I am going elsewhere.
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My direction is towards unfinished, fluid geometric shapes, with the liquid matter of the colors left free to run: I create embankments on the paper, leaving shapes passing anyway, flaking off. In this, I believe, there is a new dramatic sense that has entered my life: in fact, water is also something that escapes as the TIME”.
[from The shapes of time. An interview with Ennio Tamburi. in Ennio Tamburi. Continuo. Catalog of the exhibition at the Crac in Taranto, 15 December 2018 - 6 February 2019]
E.T. says….
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I consider myself an artist who has a relationship with the social, unlike those closed in on themselves who do what they feel. I try to be an interpreter of this time to raise reflections, complaints, inconveniences. I place myself as a witness of an earthly journey, always with the antennas raised to try to capture what is happening.
In my work there is always a little irony, the desire to play down and unite. My painting represents places, like geographies, or rather territories. Within these territories I express myself with the "dotted" which is a language, but also an expression of quantity, geometry, dynamics. Many times in these places that I have called enclos, from the French enclosures, the individual identifies with his fellow men. With my work I tried to go further, to bring the fence, this symbol, to a hypothesis of integration. And also to break the differences by trying to put them in contact. Attempting this integration is very difficult both from a significant and a social point of view.
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I work on two levels. The first is the background with watery colors where there is no paint, but the color entrusted to the water that draws, leaves stains, small puddles before it dries. In this first phase there is no intervention from me, it is all random, linked to the free imagination of water that arranges itself as it wants. When the color dries, we move on to the second level: geometric and dynamic constructions, usually with a single color, and in this phase I work with great meticulousness. There are thousands of points to reach that shape, that concept of two sides that confront each other suspiciously. I feel the need to achieve symmetry and balance between the non-control of the first level and rational geometry. I don't dare to condition the first level, because it is the most spontaneous and creative part. Precisely for this reason I have never thrown away my paper.
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(From Ennio Tamburi: true art is escaping banality, Interview with Ennio Tamburi, Panorama by Myriam Dolce)