Tino Stefanoni

Tino Stefanoni was born in Lecco in 1937. He studied at the Beato Angelico Art High School and at the Faculty of Architecture of the Politecnico di Milano. For more than thirty years, he was active on the international art scene. Although his work does not belong, in the strict sense, to conceptual art, it has always developed within the same area of research.

Throughout his career, he consistently focused on the world of everyday things and objects, presenting them in their most disarming obviousness, like plates from a visual alphabet rather than pages from an instruction manual in which images replace words. In his research, there is a clear interest in presenting things rather than representing them and, at the same time, in endowing them with a subtle sense of irony and magic, drawn from an aseptic operation comparable to a lucid dream—so to speak—one that allows elementarity and mystery to coexist, two elements that by nature are not close, yet brought together through counterpoint.

Even in his more recent paintings, where the canons of classical painting (in the strict sense of the term) are deliberately pushed to extremes in favor of a didactic approach to painting (light, chiaroscuro, drawing, color), the world of things is always revealed. While remaining the resolving moment of his work and the sole tactile sign of human existence, these objects naturally acquire metaphysical meanings. L’incantato disincanto, La pittura come oggetto, Lo stato dei fatti, L’ironia oggettiva, L’illusione svelata are among the titles of texts written about his painting.

The feigned enchantment of his seemingly classical painting thus disguises the lyrical-conceptual core of a body of work that is entirely grounded in rational rigor—paradoxically, “sentimentally rational”—to the point of asserting that painting is nothing more than an object for the mind, just as a chair, a table, or a bed are objects for the body.

Tino Stefanoni passed away in Lecco on December 2, 2017.

Tino Stefanoni with Maurizio Stefanini (Stefanini Arte) in the artist’s studio.