After publishing on-line the biography of the artist and the works of the exhibition 4 Points, Sguardi.info comes back to deals with the art of Ennio Tamburi with an interview and a poem written by the artist exclusive for our portal.
When and how was your interest in art born?
You cannot "talk" of the birth of an interest in art. Art is a way of being, of existing, of thinking -- it is "born" with you, is in you, forms a part of you . and you cannot do without it: for the nostalgia of childhood, for the fear of living, or dying, for play, or because you cannot do anything else.
Are there artists who have influenced in some way your artistic productions, most of all during your formative years?
There are artists, historians, but also contemporaries, who have "not" influenced me but whom you recognise as similar, like yourself, in time.
Mental affinities . at times I see or "meet" things of artists that I had thought of myself or had wished to realise -- an unconscious meeting of similarity. They are well known meetings -- Klee, Rothko, Newman, Kelly -- all artists in which I recognise myself.
What are the signs that enable you to understand that the moment has come to begin to work on a new work?
There are no precise "signals". For some it is an emotion, so to speak, for others (Picasso) it is finding and not to searching -- as Baudelaire says -- "We are like souls seeking a body, to enter, when it is most desired, in every person ."
Do you generally prefer to re-elaborate a particular intuition or do you create through the assiduous experimentation of a sign?"
I would not wish to seem "melancholy", but the artist, who does this work, does not re-elaboate particular intuitions and does not create. The artist is given , that capacity, an inexhausted daring to explore the ambiguous universe of the comic ,and of horror of the vague and infinite where he can meet only a "solitary and desperate MONAD" like himself.
If you had to describe the essential characteristics of your way of doing art, of what would you think?
The point is, a most concise form in time, a clean definite unity, in certain combinations, with the surface of the background. This will be a sufficient means of expression. The work may, in the last analysis, be constituted also by only one "POINT".
for many artists creation represents also an interior search to manage to express a part of one's most hidden self, is it like that for you?
"Literature, like art, is the demostration that life is not enough" (Pessoa). Painting, I think, is not permanent, but nomadic. Nor only does it make us travel in the world but it makes us cross the human soul (Trabucci).
My work is very "deep" in the sense that it seeks, always, to find that "symmetry" between the real and the submerged, the conscious and the unconscious.
In your works what bond exists btetween sign and material?
The two elements, as you define them, sign and material, are, for my work, identical. Like the MONAD, as I said before, every element is autonomous but "moves" seeking "relationships" with a similar one. Matter-sign, Sign-matter, real and phantastic, an orchestration in colour -- where culture is joined to instinct in a symmetrical way.
With regard to the verses you wrote for Sguardi.info, what role has poetry for your artistic reflections?
Poetry is not the immediate end of the painter; and when it is mixed with painting, the work, certainly, acquires a depth, more value, but it cannot hide weaknesses. Seeking poetry in the conceptions of a picture is the surest way of not finding it.
Poetry must emerge in the unknown, as a result of the painting itself, as much as it resides, is, in the spectator, and the work consists of awakening it, if it is there.
Poetry is in my work and has no role except that of being itself. On occasion of my last personal exhibition in Gineva, critics defined my work as "Géometrie poétique".
