Bagliori e profumi dell’Oriente nelle trenta tavole di Madaudo

PALERMO. Beppe Madaudo (Palermo, 1950) returns to his native city with an exhibition of oils and mixed media on panel at Maurilio Catalano’s Arte al Borgo gallery (via Mazzini 47). Opened last Thursday, the exhibition will remain on view until April 3.

More than thirty works, both small and large in format, collectively reveal a new approach to painting by an artist whose activity has, since his youthful beginnings, been sustained by natural talent and refined figurative invention, underscored by a solid draftsmanship and a strong sense of individuality.

Madaudo publicly demonstrated his talent as early as the age of fourteen, when the Galleria Flaccovio hosted his first painting exhibition. At eighteen, in 1968, he left Sicily and moved to Rome, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 1973.

From then on — up to a certain point — he devoted himself to book illustration. He worked for Mondadori and Garzanti, collaborated with the weekly magazines L’Espresso and L’Europeo, and illustrated with vivid imagination the stories collected in the four volumes of La Porta del Sole, a joint initiative by Giornale di Sicilia and Novecento.

His success as an illustrator was marked by prestigious recognitions, including the Yellow Kid Award, granted to him in 1976 as best Italian illustrator. He later illustrated The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen for Olivetti, though he now considers that commission “the last of a long season.”

“After ten years,” he explains, “I emerged from the cage of having to interpret someone else’s work, of being forced to translate words into images that are, in a certain sense, predetermined. As a result, I now feel free to dream and to draw.”

From this newfound freedom come the paintings he brought to Palermo from the Roman countryside, where he has withdrawn in recent years.

These are sumptuous paintings, rich in colour and atmosphere, at times filled with gold, privileging imagination above all else. The tiger behind bars rising on its hind legs and the carefree fire-eater beneath the circus tent undoubtedly evoke a circus atmosphere, but there are also flashes of the Orient, traces of adventurous tales, scents of harems and the complicity of odalisques, or simply the sense of violated intimacy suggested by certain images of half-nude women, now with black skin, now with white.

Madaudo has a particular fascination with the Orient and its symbols. In 1989, in Milan, he presented a series of panels inspired by thirteenth-century Persian tales. Odalisques and camels, palm trees and flying carpets stemmed from the cultural roots of an educated Sicilian like Madaudo, who spent his childhood in a Palermo where the echo of the East still lingered in the air.

Without doubt, the seductions of a mythologized horizon continue to exert a strong influence — with deeply evocative results — on an artist viscerally attached to painting and to its phantoms.

Giuseppe Quatriglio