Tarcisio Merati

Infobox Artist
name = Tarcisio Merati
birthdate = birth date|1934|05|27|mf=y
location = Bonate Sotto, Italy
deathdate = death date|1995|10|22
deathplace = Bergamo, Italy
nationality = Italian
field = Painting Also named with the nick "Coccolone", He has been one of the most important Italian Outsider Art artists of the XX century.

=Biography=

Tarcisio Merati was born in Italy at Bonate Sopra in the province of Bergamo, on May 27 th 1934 to a family of artisans. His mother also worked in a local church.Tarcisio was hospitalized for psychiatric reasons for the first time in Bergamo during the summer of 1959. His diagnosis was "Dissociative symptom complex, schizophrenia" and later "late mental psychosis". Merati was released and re-admitted to the asylum several times during the next 15 years.In the following period from 1974 to 1984, something had changed in Merati's behavior, as evidenced by observational records and his surviving work, although his medical records do not indicate a substantial change in treatment. In the clinical memorial of July 23 rd 1983 it can be read: "Discreetly clean, also in the department and all 'studio, paints rather abstract pictures." And they are that the most active years and probably more interesting in the artistic outturn of Merati. Your "Blaue Reiter" it incessantly gallops in the second halves the years 70.The everything happens nell 'by now mythical Studio or ergoterapic department of the hospital managed in all of his duration by Amilcare Cristini, that will be and will remain up to the end his most important friend and referente and perhaps (gives the same passion for the painting) his unintentional initiator to the love for the brushes and the colors. Cristini will also have the meaningful worth not to interact to condition its particular fancy of the artist Merati, abridging to observe curious of it and I make an attempt his development. Let's not forget us that "Coccolone" work and play also with the words and with the music. Rather at this time he was more famous, and in some verse "sought after" really for the marvelous eccentricity of his language, and of his incomprehensible but genial dialectical performance. The music from him played (especially on the tuneless piano present in the Atelier) it had obsessive characteristics and mimimaliste instead.In the artistic field its subjects are often repeated in a convulsive seriality. they are almost always of the Story Toys, abstract little toys like the well known machinette trombette (little trumpet-car) or little scalene airplane . Also for the innumerable birdies on the nest, the pine-cones and the cactuses.In 1983, with frequent authorizations, and then in 1984, boundlessly is unlocked 'obligation to remain in the hospital. Accordingly it has to leave the studio and his artistic activity he interrupts, Merati stops painting. Returned home under the liability of his sister that can have now the pension of Tarcisio and, instead of exalting, it impoverishes his artistic talent forcing him to an ungrateful and repetitive job: the assemblage of the wheels of little cars models , thousand a day to the price of a cent.In 1991 it moves him to a rest home next to the old hospital, where the studio is still open, that he resumes to frequent. But the rhythm is by now more tired, more goslow. The blaue reiter has stopped racing. In 1993, great event: its first great art exposition is arranged him in to the Social Theater in Bergamo. In 2006 a second important show even more in Bergamo. Tarcisio serenely spends the last years of Your lifetime. October 22 nd 1995 dies for a tumor to the lung.

Artistic critical report (extracts)

"...Still truer, only, high-powered it is the graphic language with which Tarcisio is expressed. In it the symbolic contents appear clear, evident, essential. They are these symbols, express in the forms and in the colors, that make rich, exciting, intense, general purpose the work of Tarcisio. Many gods paintings of Tarcisio, above all those that go up again a years' 75 -' 76, withdraw in-house organs of the human body: heart, intestines, brain, uterus, punishments with urethral channel in evidence, particularly elements that concern the genital Area (side figures). Tarcisio "it feels" these threatening organs and persecutori also when it paints them with vivacious colors that remember the cromia of Klimt, or of Wassily Kandinsky...."

Extracted by a critical report of Maria Rita Parsi

"... Tarcisio Merati is the mentally deranged artist for excellence: to the shelter from the hostile world against which he is insert in form of novelist, musician, political man, teacher; to the shelter from the poverties and from the vulgarity he can finally devote to the operation of the wonder."

Extracted by a critical report of Bianca Tosatti

References

* Tarciso Merati opere 1975-1991 - Saggi di Vittorio Sgarbi, Mauro Ceruti, Maria Rita Parsi (in Italian) Ceribelli Editore Bergamo 1993. ISBN 88-86185-01-4
* L'arte Naive nr. 69 Arte Marginale (in Italian) Dicembre 2002 Reggio Emilia
* Oltre la Ragione - le figure, i maestri, le storie dell'arte irregolare di Bianca Tosatti (in Italian) editrice Skira 2006

External links

* L'arte di Tarciso Merati (in English and Italian) http://www.storytoys.com/index.htm
* Associazione Tarciso Merati http://www.associazionemerati.org/