A study in Colour
Paolo Tarcisio Generali (1904-1998)

an exhibition of selected works curated by G. Gardini

exhibition catalogue: Poppi, Palazzo Giorgi, 3 July-31 August 2005; Fano, Rocca Malatestiana, 10 September-23 October 2005

“I try to capture the light, so as to remind everyone that we are the children of Light. Light traverses human boundaries, moving towards the infinite and eternal. Light is serenity, it is life, or rather the essence of life itself” (Paolo Tarcisio Generali).

“Paolo Tarcisio Generali’s paintings – works that combine paint and word – can be regarded as the pages of a diary. A mixture and distillation of landscapes, faces, moods and prayers, in them we can see the full and multifaceted nature of the man, the painter and the monk” (Giovanni Gardini).

Paolo Generali was born in Fano in 1904; in 1934, at the age of thirty, he entered the monastic community of the Holy Hermitage of Camaldoli, in the Casentino region, and following a year’s initiation into monastic life he took the name of Don Tarcisio. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, the city councils of Fano and Poppi, with the collaboration of the Camaldolese monks, hosted an important exhibition of selected works by the painter: a journey through light and colour that reflects the troubled spiritual and intellectual journey that was his life – a life lived, however, in the words of Don Emanuele Bargellini, Prior General of Camaldoli, looking at the world “with the gaze of a child”. The exhibition documents the various phases of Generali’s development as an artist, from the realism of his early production to the works of his artistic and technical maturity, marked by the abandonment of the brush in favour of the spatula. An abundant use of colour had always been a feature of his work, and the spatula enabled him to apply colour directly onto the wood and mould it to create volumes, slowly and vigorously giving life to the painting.