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Tino Stefanoni
- Jan 28
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 18
Biography and Formation
Tino Stefanoni was born in Lecco in 1937. He studied at the Beato Angelico Art School and at the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Milan. For more than thirty years he was present within the international art world. Although his work did not belong strictly to conceptual art, it nevertheless developed within the same area of research.
Everyday Objects and Visual Language
He consistently looked at the world of everyday things and objects, presenting them in their most disarming obviousness, like pages from a visual primer or from an instruction booklet in which images replace words.
Within his research, there is a clear interest in presenting things rather than representing them and, at the same time, in clothing them with subtle irony and a sense of magic drawn from an aseptic operation — rather like a lucid dream, one might say — in which simplicity and mystery can coexist, two elements that by their nature are not close, yet become adjacent through counterpoint.
Painting, Irony and Metaphysical Meaning
Even in his more recent paintings, where the canons of classical painting (in the strict sense of the term) are deliberately intensified in favour of a didactic exploration of the pictorial language — light, chiaroscuro, drawing, colour — the world of things is always revealed.
While remaining the resolving moment of his work and the only tactile sign of man’s existence, these objects naturally become charged with metaphysical meanings.
L'incantato disincanto – La pittura come oggetto – Lo stato dei fatti – L'ironia oggettiva – L'illusione svelata are some of the titles of texts written about his painting.
A Rational and Poetic Vision
The feigned enchantment of his apparently classical painting therefore disguises the lyrical-conceptual moment of a practice that is entirely rational, paradoxically “sentimentally rational”, to the point of underlining that painting is nothing other than an object for the mind, just as the chair, the table or the bed are objects for the body.
Tino Stefanoni passed away in Lecco on 2 December 2017.
